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kiwisbell · 7 months

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Red Light [landlord!joel miller]

The men you keep bringing home are no good for you. It's up to your landlord Joel to protect you from heartbreak.

my masterlist!

pairing: joel miller x f!reader

rating: 18+ (mdni)

tags and warnings: AU - no outbreak/modern day, obsessive!joel, dark!joel, but also soft!joel, landlord!joel, violence, death, murder, stalking, jealousy, truly creepy behaviour, unprotected sex (lead by example; just not mine), creampie, dubious consent, reader’s serious lack of self-preservation, sexual tension, abuse of power, spanking, spitting, squirting, praise kink, degradation kink, joel is a munch, somnophilia, possessive behaviour, dirty talk, a smidgen of gaslighting, the general filth you should expect from me by now, a spoonful of genuine intimate connection™️, implied age gap, submissive reader, dominant joel, daddy kink, knives, mild torture, light anal play, voyeurism, unreliable narration, inappropriate use of a necklace, panty sniffing, ambiguous(?) ending

word count: ~ 15.8k (uh, oops!)

read on ao3!

hello, all! this fic has been tossing and turning inside the proverbial sheets of my head for a while now. when i tell you it's darker than anything i've written, i mean it, so please, please mind the tags. this story does not depict a healthy relationship; joel is a total creep and both he and reader are heavily delusional. with that said, please enjoy this (super long) one-shot!! xoxo

PREFACE

Stars, hide your fires; Let not light see my black and deep desires. — Macbeth, I.IV

THE TENANT

You're beginning to think it’s a built-in bad luck charm. A microchip implanted in your skin or a flaw you have yet to pick out. Every single one of your prospective boyfriends has disappeared off the face of the Earth since you moved into town.

It isn't you. It's not. There is nothing wrong with you. It isn't your fault that either they decide after one date that you aren't worth seeing again, or they stand you up before the date can even begin. Your profile pictures are decent. You followed the rules meticulously: a shot of your face, a group picture to show you have friends, a selfie, a candid. You've examined them time and time again for flaws and find none that a man would care about. You're pretty. Sexy. Confident. They're just intimidated. Fuck, you're turning into your mother.

And yet—

Since moving into this apartment—this beautiful, once-in-a-lifetime deal of an apartment—your luck with dating has abruptly ended.

It's a lovely building. A stout brownstone with wrought-iron stairs and an old, but functional, elevator, it's traditional and charming. Perfect for a single woman.

Six months. This is your first second date in six months. David is just fine. He's handsome in a frat-initiate kind of way, with a nice smile and a good sense of dress. He doesn't ask many questions about you, and he's a little pretentious about films you don't give a shit about, but he likes you. You didn't have a horrible time on the first date: he wasn't afraid to spend his money on you at the nice restaurant. And he has a car.

Raised as an optimist, you learned to see the good parts of a situation. David can work out.

On the way out of the elevator, you spot your landlord Joel speaking to the concierge. You instinctively smooth down your hair and wave at him as you walk by, shrugging your purse onto your shoulder. “Hi, Joel. Hi, Sam.”

Sam the concierge waves back, but Joel puts his back to the conversation and gives you his full attention, bracing his hands on the edge of the desk. Your heart leaps and your head goes fuzzy with nerves. You barely manage to force a giddy giggle back down your throat. Relief coats your bones when Sam excuses himself to take a call.

Joel Miller’s an older guy, his tousled dark hair threaded with silver on his head and in his beard. One look at him and a person could know that he works with his hands for a living; he’s broad-shouldered, strong, with big arms and a capable air about him. He’s proven his mettle a hundred times over already with the miniscule repairs he’s made to the building. He turned it into a good place to live; he even trims the hedges outside and polishes the doorknobs when they get rusty.

He’s wearing a green T-shirt today, which is another member of the typical summertime circulation of blue and grey T-shirts, and a pair of jeans. “Evening,” he says, his rich brown eyes sparkling. Sometimes, you can see him smile when his mouth isn’t showing it. It’s charming. Enthralling. “How’s that new lock workin’ out for you?”

You grin. He remembered. Joel installed a new deadbolt on your door last week, since the chain on the last one broke. “It’s perfect,” you tell him. “Are you in a chocolate or lemon mood this time?”

His gaze flickers down your body, taking in your yellow dress, before meeting yours again. “Lemon,” he says.

You bite the inside of your cheek. Talking to a handsome man feels like tossing your heart in the air and trying to juggle. Flirting with a handsome man is like toeing a tightrope between two mountains and forcing yourself not to look down. Your stomach swoops with the path of his eyes over your body, and you cannot convince yourself that you imagined it. “Lemon squares it is. Thank you again, Joel.”

“Just my job to keep my tenants safe,” he says, lifting one shoulder in a shrug. You can see a pair of keys in his pocket along with his cell phone. The mere sight of his belt makes your cheeks hot. Why are you looking at his belt? You’re going on a date with another man, for God’s sake. Relax.

“Helps when I like my tenants so much,” adds Joel, and you forget why you were scolding yourself in the first place.

“Yeah?” You tilt your head to the side. “Maybe you should be baking for them, instead.”

Joel steps away from the desk, working his jaw as he seems to fight down a smile. “It’s for the best this way, believe me. Can’t cook for shit.”

“Big, strong man like you can’t work a stove?” you tease. Don’t look down.

“I only fix ‘em.” There’s a crooked smile on his face now, and your heart beats your ribs to shrapnel. “You look real nice. Goin’ somewhere?”

That simple validation calms your nerves more effectively than a half-hour of repeating affirmations into the mirror before leaving your apartment. You give the skirt of your sundress a little swish. “A date, actually,” you say, feeling sheepish. Your landlord certainly doesn’t need to hear about your track record as of late. “He’s taking me to Sunfest, in the park.”

A minute twitch of his brow is the only reaction he gives to the news. “That so?” he says. “Lucky man.”

“More like lucky me,” you say with a small laugh, tucking your hair behind your ear. Stop talking, you plead to yourself. Too much information. Shut up, kindly excuse yourself, and leave.

Joel shakes his head, and now is the first time you notice that his eyes haven’t once left you. It warms your body. “He’s the lucky one. Trust me.”

“Okay. I concede.” You chew on your lip for a moment and, sure enough, his gaze hones in on your mouth. The air in the lobby crackles white-hot. You clear your throat, turning your head to find David’s car parked on the street outside. “I should go. But I promise I’ll get started on those lemon squares soon.”

It’s a possibility that you only imagine Joel’s eyes flitting from the car outside back to you when you turn your head back to face him. “Do me a favour?” he says, a scrape to his deep drawl.

“Anything, Joel.”

A muscle in his jaw ticks. “Be safe,” he says. “You have my number if anything goes wrong.”

You give him a grateful smile. “I’ll be safe, Joel. And if I’m not, you’re the first person I’ll call.”

“Good. That’s…” He trails off, still watching you, his eyes trained in their path across your face. “You’re good. Smart, beautiful, good. You deserve to have somethin’ real.”

The simple, small praises melt your bone marrow and recast it in the shape of him. The old chandelier hanging from the ceiling casts him in a soft light, stark against the hard muscles and profound depths in his eyes. He's breathtaking. You've always known it, but…

He sees something in you, too.

David honks his horn and makes you jump out of your stupor. You walk backwards out of the lobby just to keep looking at Joel for as long as you can. “For the record,” you say, “you’re a good man, Joel.”

“Don’t be so sure, honey,” he replies, his tone playful.

You laugh, hurrying out to David’s car as the door closes behind you.

“This place is beautiful,” you said to Sam, the concierge working the front desk of your prospective apartment. The appropriate paperwork was in your arms, your eyes scanning every inch of the old building. Of all the places you'd seen in and around the neighbourhood, this was the most promising. You hoped to get a glimpse at a unit before you signed, though. Assuming the landlord even wanted you to live here.

Sam smiled at you. “Lots of people just see the cracks.”

“There's so much character,” you replied, admiring the crystal chandelier. The walls were a calming, aged white, the floors genuine hardwood. The lobby was decorated with plush chairs upholstered with burnt orange fabric, the corners filled with real potted plants.

The door opened behind you, and you turned to see a handsome stranger, dressed in a pair of dirty jeans and mud-caked shirt, wiping his forehead with his forearm. Behind you, Sam said, “This is Joel Miller. The landlord.”

“Oh!” You were flustered, floundering to stretch out your hand to shake as you introduced yourself. “I’m sorry to catch you at a bad time. This building is gorgeous. You've done a great job with it, Mr. Miller.”

The landlord did not once look at Sam, his eyes fixed solely on you as he wiped a hand on the cloth slung over his shoulder and shook your hand. His hand engulfed yours, warm and rough. The touch jolted you like an electric shock. Your hands must have been clammy and shaking with nerves, but the contact steeled you.

The intensity of his gaze, however, made you shift on your feet. He didn't waver, didn't stray, like a man set on a mission. Nothing about him was shy. He drank in the sight of you, indulging without shame, his eyes travelling to the next destination once they'd had their fill. It made you feel stripped to the bone.

“It's nice to meet you,” he said. “Sorry for the dirt. Just finished weeding.”

You shook your head in dismissal. “You really take care of this place.”

“It's good work,” he said plainly. “Serves me well. I like gettin’ my hands dirty, fixin’ things.”

“Where were you when my sink broke every week at my old place?”

“Fixing the sinks in this one.”

You laughed. “Well, for what it's worth, the outside is beautiful, too. Not a weed in sight.”

“Pleased to hear it,” said Joel, his dark eyes glittering under the chandelier.

“You're from Texas!” you said suddenly. Oh, God, kill me now. I sound like a stalker.

But Joel smiled, a raspy laugh leaving his mouth. You wondered if he laughed often. He looked like a serious man. “You familiar?”

“I was born there,” you supplied. “Left when I was young, but my dad lived there all his life.”

“Lookin’ good on you already,” he said. “It’ll be nice havin’ another one of us around.”

“Does that mean you're considering me?” you couldn't help but ask. Fuck, you wanted this apartment.

“I've already considered,” said Joel, his eyes sweeping your body. “You're the only applicant.”

Your hands were trembling and your heart thrummed with excitement. “Oh, God, thank you!” you gasped. “Joel, thank you.”

You could swear his chest swelled a bit at your graciousness. “I can show you the unit, if you’d like. It needs some TLC, but I’m happy to help with the process as best I can. Unless you have someone to…”

You realised what he was hinting at and shook your head. “Oh, no, it’s just me. I’d love to take a look.”

You noted the slight drop of his shoulders and followed him into the elevator. A part of you was surprised to see there was no gate that closed you in; they were plain, somewhat modern elevator doors. “Fixed it last month,” Joel said, looking sideways at you. “Just in time, apparently.”

You grinned at him, bouncing on the balls of your feet. “Nice to see there's no creepy operator in here.”

“Just me.” He punched the button for the third floor and rode with you to the top.

This was the start of your new life.

You shut the passenger’s side door and situate yourself inside David’s Lincoln. He’s dressed in a pair of black shorts and a clean Henley. “Hey, beautiful,” he says, leaning in to kiss you across the console.

You hum, smiling against his mouth. “You clean up nice, too.”

He places a hand on your thigh and pulls away from the curb. He's a touchy person, which is perfectly fine considering how long your latest dry spell has lasted, but at least he isn't inching his way up your dress to cop a feel while he drives.

The festival is bustling with people, tented stands, and the smell of fried dough and beer. It’s almost dinnertime, and your stomach growls. When was the last time you ate? You spent hours agonising over what to wear until you were sweating and had to shower all over again. You wish you’d snuck an apple into your purse.

David pulls you into him as you both walk through the winding paths between vendors. “It’s a beautiful night,” you say breezily.

David squeezes your waist. “Mmm. You’re beautiful.”

A bit too corny for your taste, but you let it slide. “Don't tell me you're allergic to powdered sugar, because I’ve been eyeing the elephant ears.”

“God, if I eat that shit, I think it’ll set me back a month at the gym,” he laughs. “Let’s get one for you, though.”

Great. Now you're the expensive date who eats while her date watches her stuff her mouth with an elephant ear. “Uh. Maybe later.”

You stop at a jewellery vendor and spend a good while eyeing up a beautiful gold necklace and the heart-shaped pendant dangling from it. David doesn’t notice your staring and breezes by with your hand firmly in his. “Let's check out the grand stand. My buddy’s band is playing before the fireworks display.”

“Sure,” you say, turning your head to watch the necklace disappear slowly from view.

The gigantic domed stage houses a group of musicians currently tuning up their instruments. David sidles right up to the front and releases your hand to execute an elaborate handshake with his friend, who’s fine-tuning his bass.

“Hey, man,” greets the bass player. “Good to see you. Who’s this?”

You open your mouth to introduce yourself, stretching your hand out, but David says, “My date for tonight. Baby, this is Ray, of Uncontrolled Bleeding fame.”

The bass player shakes your hand politely. “Very nice to meet you.”

Because it doesn’t seem to matter much to David, you decide it’s worth the time to tell Ray your name. “It’s nice to meet you, Ray. I’m excited to hear you play.”

Not that you've ever heard of a band called Uncontrolled Bleeding. Still, Ray seems nice enough, and you're on a date. You should give them a chance.

David squeezes your waist and kisses you lightly on the temple. “You mind if I go backstage for a bit to say hi to the other guys? Won’t be long.”

What?

“Oh!” you manage to eke out over the great swooping nosedive your heart has just performed. He’s here to see his friends. He’s not on a date. “Of course. Take your time. I’ll just… walk around.”

David departs with Ray for a personal backstage tour while you bite down on your tongue and turn back in the direction of the main strip. A few vendors catch your attention, and you take your time because God knows David is taking his. A little bit of you revels in your own petty victory when, a half-hour later, Uncontrolled Bleeding begins to blare their metallic, screaming anthems across the park and you haven’t returned to the grand stand.

You find your way back to the jewellery vendor to ponder over your favourite necklace some more, but your night gets worse when you find that it’s disappeared from the headless display mannequin. You solemnly slide your wallet back into your bag and pause when you hear your phone ringing.

“Hello?”

“Where are you?” It’s David’s voice, presumably, though it’s so loud on the other end of the line that you can barely make out his words. “I can’t… where… left?”

You plug one ear and look vaguely in the direction of the grand stand across the park. “I can’t hear you very well, David.”

“… afterparty… downtown… going… Uber home?”

You press your lips together and look down at the ground: at your pretty sandals, your new dress. Your entirely wasted potential on a guy who wanted you to find your own way home. “Yeah, David,” you say tightly. You don’t particularly care if he can hear you. “You have fun with your friends.”

“Can’t hear… talk later… okay?”

You hang up and wander back toward the vendor selling elephant ears.

“Miller.”

“Hi, Joel.”

“Honey, it’s loud. Can barely hear you. Are you safe?”

“I’m safe, Joel, I promise. It’s just—Uncontrolled Bleeding.”

“What?”

“No, I mean, the band. They’re really loud. I hate to ask, and I know it’s late, but—”

“What do you need?”

“I, uh… I need a ride home. I can’t get a cab, and all the Ubers around are taken, and the busses are rerouted all the way—”

“I’m comin’ to get you. You just wait for me at the entrance, okay, baby girl?”

“Thank you, Joel.”

“You know I said you could call me for anything. I meant it.”

“Okay. I’ll see you soon.”

“I’ll see you soon.”

“Oh! Wait—”

“What? What is it?”

“Do you want an elephant ear?”

Joel is white-knuckling the steering wheel when he arrives to pick you up. Despite the congestion around the festival grounds and the fact that your apartment is at least fifteen minutes away, Joel makes it to you in a mere five.

“Did you blow every red light to get here, Mr. Miller?” you ask with a playful smile as you secure your seatbelt and settle on the truck bench.

“I was in the area,” he says with a crooked smile, looking your way. “May have pushed forty a couple times, though.”

You sheepishly extend a cardboard takeout box filled with fried, powdered dough. “Will you take this as my sincere thanks, or will you expect a separate batch of lemon squares?”

Joel answers by dipping his head and taking a bite of the flattened, doughy bread. You watch every minute movement, his strong jaw working as he chews, indulging you even though he’s already done far too much to get you out of this rut. He doesn’t once break eye contact while he eats; you begin to chew subconsciously on your bottom lip.

“Ain’t bad,” he declares at last, and your shoulders deflate with a kind of relief, “but if you let me take you for some real dinner, I’ll forget about that extra batch.”

You tentatively reach for his mouth and swipe some powdered sugar from his moustache with the pad of your thumb. You feel his eyes scanning your face all the while. “Look at me, the lucky girl,” you say softly. “One date goes wrong, and there’s a strong, handsome man waiting to take me on another.”

From the very first day, Joel Miller has always taken his time when it comes to looking at you. It’s a penetrative stare that makes your skin heat up from the tips of your ears down to your chest. His eyes are so dark, pools of warm melted sugar, and you feel yourself leaning, trancelike, slow, into that cavernous gaze. Your body is not your own. It seeks the subtle warmth, the familiar scent—sawdust, coffee beans, rich, dark cologne—and the violent torrent of sensation that erupts from the contact point when he cups your cheek in one hand.

You’re in the throes of attention, warm as a candle weeping fat waxen tears.

“Told you before,” says Joel, his thumb sweeping fondly across your chin, “you deserve somethin’ real.”

“Yeah,” you sigh happily, feeling all-too complacent under the touch of his rough palm, “maybe I do.”

Behind you, a car honks its horn, and Joel curses, pulling away from the curb. He takes you to Turner’s, a bar by campus that would be crawling with students if it weren’t for the festival. Joel comes around to the passenger’s door and opens it for you, helping you hop out with your hand enclosed in his. His palm is a steady weight on your back as you both walk inside the dim, stuffy bar.

The back is bustling with activity—drunk folks playing pool or watching the Huskies’ football game or splitting their attention between both—but the bar itself has enough spaces open to fit the two of you. Here, the light is burnt orange, and it makes the strands of grey in his hair shimmer gold. His eyes observe his surroundings with a military precision before they flit back to you, magnetic.

“Shame to waste this dress on that asshole,” says Joel, sweeping his gaze down, back up, barely perceptible. “You’re too goddamn pretty for any of ‘em.”

You’re deliciously abuzz with the incisive way he compliments you. It feels like being punctured down to your very soul; you will never forget the shape of the stain his words leave. “Do you spy on all my dates, Joel?”

He smirks. “Don’t need to spy on ‘em, baby. They’re a bunch of obnoxious kids.”

You huff, resting your cheek against your palm. “I just don’t get it. I thought David was just fine. Then, he takes me on a date just to abandon me for his friends and tell me to find my own way home.”

Joel shakes his head, scoffing as he runs his fingers through his beard. He does that when he’s frustrated sometimes, and you wonder if his hair is soft or coarse. “Piece of shit doesn't know how good he got it.”

“You must know something I don’t,” you say mirthlessly, watching the bartender approach from the other end of the long honey-oak block. “I haven't been able to get a second date since I moved in.”

Joel is silent, eyes still firmly fixed to you, until the bartender arrives, a charming middle-aged woman with a particular Texan twang you could recognise from a mile away. “What’ll it be, Joel?” she asks, giving him a sweet dimpled smile. “Hi, honey. This old man botherin’ you?”

“Only in a nice way,” you reply, squeezing his shoulder.

Joel hides his grin with a swipe of his fingers over his bottom lip. “Coffee for me, Rina. Drivin’ home.”

Rina’s eyes slide to you, and you ask for the same. You don't want to drink alone. She reappears moments later with two small, chipped mugs of dark roast in her hands. Setting them in front of you, she takes your food orders: a BLT for Joel and a veggie burger for yourself. It’s almost ten o’clock now, too late to eat, but your eyes droop sleepily and your stomach growls for a taste of real food. The powdered dough, shockingly, did not suffice.

“You ever miss Texas?” Joel asks once you're halfway into your respective meals. You notice that he only digs into his sandwich when you aren't eating, and abstains briefly to watch while you take your bites. It's an exchange of energy, a steady vigil by your side, the hypnotic pull of his warm body. You cannot scoot any closer to him, but your leg brushes his where you rest your foot on his barstool.

“I wish I remembered more of it,” you tell him. “I grew up a big city girl. Even lost my accent a year into being away. My dad would tease me about it all the time. Said I’d been gentrified.” You fondly shake your head. “Miss him like hell.”

“I can still hear it sometimes,” says Joel, tilting his head to the side, “when you get all passionate about somethin’. Like the time I installed your deadbolt and you tried to explain away your Backstreet Boys CD.”

You put your head in your hands. “Oh, God. I thought you'd forgotten.”

“Nuh-uh, baby, you ain't easy to forget. And I like when you get excited. You get this look in your eye.”

“Yeah?” You slide your foot up his ankle and bring the leg of his jeans with it. Up, down, you keep going, letting the relative darkness embolden you, his sweet little pet names and his silent adequacy enabling what is most definitely inappropriate behaviour. “Tell me about this look, Joel.”

He rests his elbow up on the bar and squares his broad shoulders to you. They eclipse all the other patrons behind him. “You've got pretty eyes,” he tells you. “First thing I noticed when I met you all those months ago. Saw how they lit up when you smiled. Heard your happiness when you told me about Texas. It was nice to be the reason you smiled, ‘n’ I just wanted to make it happen again. I couldn't say no to you. Don't know how any man ever could.”

The revelation stuns you in your seat. His expression telegraphs little save for his attentiveness, his posture locked parallel with yours, singularly focused on the way you react to him.

You try for a joke. “And I was the only applicant.”

It crumbles, sand in your mouth. Something has shifted. Joel isn't the type to shy away from a conversation, but his gaze hasn't once shifted from your face. It feels like flames licking your cheeks, the heat of that look pushing in on both sides, inescapable. You find that you enjoy the way his attention makes you preen; you want him to look at you.

He thinks you have pretty eyes.

“You know that ain't the reason why,” he says, whisper-quiet and gruff amid the vague chatter in the bar.

“Why, Joel?” you ask, spine straightening, teeth sinking into your bottom lip. As you suspected, his eyes flick down your face, lashes obscuring the precise shade of his irises.

His Adam’s apple dips. “‘Cause I like you,” he says, the feeling of it like the slide of suede down your spine, “and I wanna keep you safe.”

You shrug slightly, giving him a smile. “I feel pretty safe.”

Joel’s hand drops to the bar top and his fingertips brush yours. The touch jolts your sleepy mind awake. “You're too good for every single one of those assholes you bring around. You know that, right?”

“I’m beginning to understand.”

“You deserve someone who's gonna be good to you. Give you all the attention you need. Make you… happy.”

You swallow thickly, the candle flame pressing in, sucking the oxygen from your lungs. “Thank you, Joel.”

His fingers begin to creep up every ridge of your knuckles, slowly turning over your palm so it faces the ceiling. The rough pad of his thumb traces the long lifeline inside.

“Repeat it.”

His eyes lift to yours, and for a moment, there’s something in them that ignites an instinct inside you to flee. There's danger in those eyes: the careful, measured restraint of a man who knows more anger than he lets show. A flicker, brief but incandescent, passes through your head, an electrical current.

He’s the reason you never had a second date.

It disappears the instant it comes, the Paterian glimpse of an idea in its entirety fleeing for the horizon, and the instinct recedes in favour of the warm, melting sensation his fingers disseminate through your bones.

“I deserve someone who will be good to me,” you repeat, like a mantra. “I deserve someone who’s going to make me happy, and keep me safe.”

“That's right,” says Joel, brushing his thumb along the veins in your wrist. You feel the shiver, but you're locked to him, your eyes unable to take in any information apart from the way he feels, looks, smells. “You're a good girl, baby.”

Your lashes flutter and a sweeping rush of pressure descends on your core at the way those words sound on his tongue. You picture him directing you to your knees and calling you a good girl while you take his big cock between your lips, imagine the way he would hiss through his teeth, good fuckin’ girl, that’s it, baby girl, while he fucks you from behind, merciless. Hands and tongues and limbs would mould into one another, amalgamate, becoming indistinguishable.

He would be good to you. You know it. He’s always been good to you.

“Joel?”

“Hmm.” Fingers still make idle patterns on your forearm.

“I think you should take a look at my sink when you get a chance. It might be broken.”

No amount of coy suggestion could make him ignorant to your desire for closeness. You can feel your body screaming for it, grasping at him with buffed claws. Joel smirks, looking down at your foot making a path up and down his ankle.

“I’ll take a look tomorrow.”

It’s two o’clock in the morning when a shuffling outside your bedroom door guides you out of a decent sleep. In total silence, the most minute noises can be deafening. But it sounds, to your sleep-addled brain, like the hasty retreat of footsteps.

You blink awake, shifting onto your other side to peer above the darkness of your doorway. Through the bleary haze in your eyes, you notice a tiny red light in the upper corner of the room.

You squint, rubbing your eyes furiously to pry them open wide, but your vision is the static grain of an old television, and your eyes refuse to adjust. Instead, you grumble, pulling your comforter over your head, and go back to sleep.

You’ll tell Joel tomorrow.

THE LANDLORD

He cannot wait until the morning.

The nighttime, he discovered long ago, is a friend. It’s the gentle descent of darkness, the horizontal fall of the golden-hour sunlight scanning the entirety of the apartment before it at last succumbs to silent, tar-black night. Occasionally, a car will pass below, or the honk of a horn will tear jaggedly through the quiet, but most times, Joel can sink comfortably into the dark and assume his post.

Six months ago, he showed some restraint.

Of course, the connection was instantaneous—the pretty girl standing in his foyer with a radiant smile on her face, drinking in the chipped paint and ancient railings and furniture imprinted with years of use, arrested all movement of his heart. You wore a white dress and a pair of strappy sandals, not suited whatsoever for walking the city but perfectly tailored to make an impression. You arrived punctually, all smiles and handshakes and Southern politeness despite your insistence that you'd left it all behind. You shone. And when Joel slid his rough, work-worn hand into yours, dipping his gaze to watch the way he dwarfed your fingers, he felt a tremor roll gently from your body to his, thunder over a mountain. He wanted to chase the next lightning strike.

It began leisurely, like a hobby, something he could go to when life got a little much. He watched you come home, examining the way your shoulders rounded slightly when you were upset and the way you wiggled your fingers in a wave to those passing by when you were happy. He watched, typically from the garden out front, as you pranced about your balcony on cool mornings to the electronic croonings of Britney Spears, curled up in a chair with a blanket over your legs and a coffee mug warming your hands, or watered your thriving plants from where they hung in the direct morning sunlight. Your day-to-day became his day-to-day.

And then, he was doing more than merely watching. He was following.

Your favourite coffee place by the apartment building, just a block away. He lingered far behind that first morning, his fingers twitching in your direction before the rest of his body steered him. The neighbourhood wasn't so great back then, prone to muggings and the like. He wanted to keep you safe. That was all.

You ordered something cold, too sweet for his tastes, and sat for a while as you worked. The barista spent the rest of your time there eyeing you up whenever he could. Joel scoffed. He wouldn't know what the fuck to do with you. Just a goddamn kid.

He followed you to work and back, on those rare days he wasn't occupied maintaining the grounds. You sat in a corner cubicle with a decent amount of sunlight and typed away on your laptop all day. Joel monitored the company’s publications just so he could have a glimpse of the way you wrote; he wasn't interested in makeup, but he bought a subscription to Viva because he wanted to trace his fingers over your name in those small italic letters. MANAGING EDITOR.

Your writing is clean, efficient, and smooth. It reads like velvet. He keeps a pile of magazines and newsletters tucked in the back of his bookshelf. For the August edition, they printed your interview with a local prizewinning novelist; you beamed in the picture, photographed in your favourite coffee shop, so happy and so generous, sharing your talent with others.

He was so fucking proud.

Five months ago, he watched you bring a date home for the first time.

It blindsided him. He could not prepare, plan, or sabotage. He could not do a thing as you guided the man—a fucking kid with a too-big ego, grinning smugly for his imminent conquest—inside the elevator. Joel could only watch helplessly, wiping his brow from his precarious place on the ladder, as you walked past him with no more than a soft, sweet smile. He never forgot the painful imprint of that smile on his eyelids. It still burns his eyes late at night, when he stays awake inside his office, monitoring his dual screens. He will pinch the bridge of his nose and close his eyes just to replay the memory of that look.

The kid left the next morning, before you woke. He never contacted you again. You trudged into the lobby that day, a weariness in your eyes that did not match the vibrant colour of your dress. You spoke idly to another woman in the elevator about your broken thermostat, hugging yourself to keep warm.

It was working perfectly a few hours later, and there was a bouquet of roses waiting for you at the concierge’s desk. Fiddling with the red ribbon, tears welling in your eyes, you asked who the admirer was. Sam shrugged his shoulders, but when you turned to look out the front windows, you saw Joel tending to the red roses in the garden bed.

It earned him the first taste of your baking. Biting into one of those moist, warm brownies felt like melting a little piece of you down and moulding it into the shape of his mouth. It felt like taking a piece of the girl he’d coveted for weeks and rolling it over his tongue, keeping it. Swallowing it down. There it rested inside his stomach until the next time he did you right.

He wanted to tell you no. To insist that he would do anything to make you feel good even if you wanted nothing to do with him. To make it clear that he did everything for you, not for some feeble professional relationship between a landlord and his tenant. He breathed you. He needed you.

So, four months ago, he began to watch you through the cameras.

They’re small, discreet, tucked into holes in the wall that have been spackled over, repainted, re-sanded. He ran the wiring while you were at work, listening to your CDs on loop to get a better sense of the earworms you hummed on your way out the door every morning. One in the living room, one by the entrance, and one in the bedroom.

He could keep you safe this way. This way, he would know if those men you brought you home were treating you right—fucking you like you deserved.

You were so goddamn pretty when you came. For months Joel had sat in his office, slicked-up cock in his hand, jerking himself hard and fast to the pictures of you in Viva. For months he’d spilled over his fingers, on his belly, on the glossy pages of the magazines. The heady, cloying scent of his own sweat and cum stuck to his nostrils. It wasn’t enough. He could imagine wrenching open your tight little pussy all he wanted—the slow, heavy drag of his cock between your hot, wet walls and the sweet noises he’d steal from your tongue—but it wasn’t the satisfaction he needed.

Joel needed you. Your body, your smile, your voice. He needed to wrap you tight around every vein, a tourniquet, squeezing until all feeling was lost.

You would be his, in time. He just needed to make it so.

The first time he watched you pleasure yourself, rain pattered gently against the window panes and thunder echoed in the distance. A couple grids had already lost power, and Joel had a backup generator if the apartment was next, but you did not seem to mind one bit that the storm drew closer. You clicked off the television, retired to the confines of your bed and its soft white linens, and slipped your hand beneath your flimsy shorts. Joel sat upright, his back creaking in protest, his knuckles white around the edge of his desk as he watched, unblinking, the way your fingers gently circled your clit.

He didn't touch his cock once that night, no matter how deeply his own need tugged at him. He couldn't look away from the camera feed for fear that he may miss the moment you reached your orgasm.

When it arrived, it was delicious to watch. Your back arched, your lips parted, and your eyes fluttered shut, fingers rapidly rubbing your slick pussy as you seized under your own ministrations and slowly settled, melting into the mattress. He needed to see more. He needed to be there.

You were a chiaroscuro of savoury, sultry magnetism and the ichor of the morning sunlight. You were kind and thoughtful. You were gentle, patient, attentive. You were one hell of a baker. You were so fucking sexy it made his tongue prickle with the prospective taste, the anticipation of touching your soft skin engulfing any sense. Reason had no place in Joel Miller’s mind when it came to the sweet girl upstairs.

Three months ago, you had recovered from the evident betrayal inherent in expecting more from your date than a one-night stand. The next man was older, a partner at a law firm, and took you to dinner at a nice restaurant. He asked questions about you and reciprocated your enthusiasm for good cuisine. He was kind and treated you well. But an incendiary rage ignited in Joel at the sight of the bastard’s hand on your lower back. Another man was touching you. Another man was getting close to you, making you smile, whispering in your ear. Another man was attempting to claim what was rightfully his.

Joel followed your date home that night instead. He lived in a high-rise downtown, the sort of building that had a doorman and a valet.

Joel followed him down to the underground lot with a lead pipe in hand.

“‘scuse me.”

He shut his car door and turned around, giving Joel a polite smile. “What can I do for you?”

A calculated sheepish scratch on the back of his head. “Just… ah, shit, I don’t mean to bother, but my engine isn't turnin' over and my phone died. Mind if I used yours?”

He patted his pockets for his cell and gave it enthusiastically. Joel did not take the phone. He used the proximity to pull the man close and bring the pipe down across his head.

Blood bloomed, pretty and potent and rich as the roses he planted for you. The body made little noise, the skull shattered upon impact, the legs crumpling. It could never have been much of a man, going down so fucking quick. Should've put up a fight.

The man must not have liked you very much to let himself die. Joel, whose eyelids were tattooed with your radiant smile, would have crawled his way back out of a certain grave. Joel loved you. You belonged to him. This was a necessary consequence.

The pipe was dented by the time he was finished. Joel sank to his knees once the body fell, bringing it down again and again, the meticulous arc of the rusted metal uniquely stirring. It felt so fucking good, battering the skull to pieces, blood and brain and bone fragments accumulating on the ground and the pipe and his face. It felt good knowing he had kept another man from betraying you, hurting you, fucking you only to leave in a blur. He was being altruistic. He was becoming a good man for you.

Joel, kneeling in the pool of warm blood until his jeans were soaked crimson, rubbed his hand down his face and smeared the blood across it. Chest heaving, he let the grin stretch his face.

He had found his calling.

Two months ago, he slipped inside your apartment while you were asleep.

You had a rough day. Your boss insisted the company could not afford to give you a raise despite skyrocketing share prices and all the fucking work you’d done for them. The rain started just before you left the building, holding back tears, and a car splashed icy, muddy water on you during your walk home. Salt in the wound. You were sniffling as you let yourself into the apartment, your hands trembling with the effort of shouldering your bag and your misery. Joel approached you from behind and lifted the bag onto his shoulder.

“Hi, Joel.” Sad and soft and still so polite despite it all.

“Hey.” He opened every door for you on the way to the elevator and rode it up with you for good measure. “Wanna talk about it?”

You just shook your head and sidled up next to him, your cheek resting on his shoulder. He held his breath, overcome with the sensation that if he moved an inch, the spell would break, and the comfort you sought from him would slip between your fingers. Your arm brushed his, your dewy lashes fluttering as you finally let yourself relax. Joel inhaled, and the scent of you cleaved him down the middle: rain and perfume.

“Would you give me a raise?”

He looked down at you and smiled. “For a batch of those cupcakes, I’d give you whatever you like.”

It was a half-truth. He’d give you whatever you wanted, cupcakes or no. The sound of your laughter dripped into his bloodstream, saline. It cleansed him of the wrongs he'd committed. He was doing what needed to be done. The world had to realise it turned for you, and then all would be right.

Hours later, when the sun finally dipped below the horizon, shrouded by distant skyscrapers, he sneaked his way inside. His master key made easy work of the lock, but he had to pull the chain lock off with a pair of pliers because his hands could not reach between the gap. He made clinical work of it and stepped inside.

There was a chair in the corner of your bedroom for days you felt like reading by the window. Joel lowered himself into it and began his vigil.

It was a science to study the way you slept. He began to learn the patterns of your breathing, the minute movements of your limbs and how they translated to the moods of your dreaming. The amount of times you turned around, groaned, or hummed correlated directly to the sort of day you'd had. He began to map your tells in his head, drawing them out, formulating blueprints of the simple things that made you.

To Joel, it was like connecting a red string between thumb tacks, like pouring the varnish over a finished painting, sealing a promise, closing an envelope. He enjoyed the satisfactory slotting of each puzzle piece into place, creating your image, finally knowing you.

By then, he’d caught the virus. He’d let himself get close, and now he was infected with it—that insatiable need to be near, to watch, to admire from mere feet away.

He continued to acquaint himself over the weeks with your sleeping self to supplement the time he could not spend with you while you were awake. On more than one occasion, he got careless, letting himself succumb to sleep in that corner chair, joining you in the dream world. In those dreams, you were wrapped up in his body, warm and soft and tight, and he was taking. He was behind you, on top of you, beneath you, forcing you to look in the mirror as he spread you open on his cock and wrapped his fingers around your throat. In those dreams, your eyes rolled back and your lips moulded to the shape of Joel, yes, oh my God, and he'd whisper back to you—my sweet girl, my good fuckin’ girl, all mine.

And you were. You were his.

Tonight, he followed you to the festival.

He watched you make a beeline for the necklace you wanted only to pout when you saw it had disappeared. He watched your face fall as David’s rejection sank bone-deep. He reeled in his own gnawing rage, pushing deep down that urge to storm right in and rip out the asshole’s throat with his goddamn teeth, and waited until you called him.

He knew you would. You trusted him. You needed him. You needed a strong, capable man to take care of you the way you deserved. So he waited inside his truck by the phone, happy to at last hear your sweet voice on the other end of the line.

Thank you, Joel.

He tucked those words under his ribs, letting them flower and spread. Those words gave him purpose, made him buzz with erratic energy, validated all his actions. He was doing everything right.

Your dress was so fucking pretty. Jesus, he wanted to slip his hands under the hem, finger the waistband of those pink panties he knew you were wearing, and bunch the fabric up around your hips as he stuffed you full of his dick. Fuck, he would fill you up with his cum and tuck your panties back over your abused pussy, keeping all of him safe inside. You’d be so happy. You’d get drunk off his cock, begging for it, crying for it. He’d give you everything.

You do feel safe with him. You said it yourself.

Now, leaning against the doorway in your bedroom, Joel turns the heart-shaped pendant over and over in his palm, rubbing his thumb over the smooth gold surface. It’s cool and quaint and will kiss your skin beautifully. But he needs to wait for the right time. He needs to make sure you’re ready.

The sense memory of your fingers on his skin, gracious and gentle, the way you always are, is pushing at the edges of his control.

There's no one like you. He’s never been more certain of anything.

You're so goddamn sweet in those tiny silk pyjamas, your body curled up on the bed and your leg slung over a large pillow. You may feel cold and lonely at night, but that's only for now. He won't let you feel alone much longer; his body calls to you, singing your name. He has only so much restraint, and he's been waiting for six months.

Your lips are slightly parted, your face smooth and serene under the spell of sleep. You're the reason he fixes what's broken. The world needs to be better for you. It needs to be safe and bright and perfect.

He planted tulips today. You’ll appreciate them, he thinks. He wants you to wake up to vibrant colours every morning and go to sleep knowing that he thinks about you.

You shift slightly in your sleep, a soft moan leaving your mouth as you hug the pillow closer. Joel straightens in the doorway, wondering if your mind can sense him nearby. He doesn't know what he would do with himself if you were dreaming about him. His eyes move from your pretty face down your chest, barely concealed by the tiny top you're wearing, to find the apex of your thighs, temptingly spread on the mattress.

He won't. He can't. You’ll never trust him if he loses himself to desire. Joel grits his teeth, his cock achingly hard in his jeans, and unbuckles his belt as silently as he can. He pulls out his dick and squeezes himself at the base, staving off what he knows will be a too-fast orgasm. You move again, your body stretching out on the bed. Joel spits into his palm and begins to stroke his cock.

He can see a sliver of your waist where your shirt rides up, half of your ass where your leg is slung over the pillow, and your tits smushed together just over the hem of that scrap of a top. You're all of his fucking fantasies rolled into one. Joel breathes hard through his nostrils, his fist tight around the tip of his cock.

He wants to shuck down those little shorts and put his face in your pretty pussy. He wants to grab your hips and guide his cock inside you. He wants to slide into your addictive cunt until you forget your name. Until you forget every name but his. Your soul will be stained with him. His has never forgotten your shape.

God, your tight pussy would feel so fucking good around his cock. He jerks himself roughly, bracing his hand against the doorframe when a little whimper leaves your mouth. Fuck, he mouths, gritting his teeth so hard that his jaw begins to ache. He fucks his own fist, sloppy and unrefined, eyes fixed to your waiting pussy between creamy-soft thighs. His cock dwarfs your slit, eager to spread you open—he’ll fix so nicely once he gets you ready.

Joel feels his stomach tighten, his balls pulling up, his jaw taut as he brings himself to a high over your body the way he has so many times. He switches so he can jerk off into the hand around which his gift to you is coiled, spilling his cum all over his fingers and the necklace as he bites into the heel of his palm. His spine decompresses and his cock slowly softens in his hand, the tension briefly relieved. His fist gradually loosens around the cum-slick necklace; the heart has imprinted its shape into his palm.

You stir, turning over in your bed, and Joel hastily departs, tucking his cock back into his jeans. He has enjoyed this brief interlude, but he has work to do.

Besides, he’ll see you in a few hours. He knows damn well the sink works just fine, but he’ll take any excuse to see you again. And it seems you’ll do the same.

Joel keeps him in a spare apartment in the building, one whose walls have been padded for soundproofing.

Joel’s sleeves are rolled to his elbows and he's occupying the chair across from David, who's taking his sweet fuckin’ time waking up. Joel’s been pacing for a half-hour, rubbing his fingers over his bottom lip, contemplative, but the bastard won't move.

So Joel takes a seat, grabs a fistful of the kid’s hair, and yanks it forcefully so he’s staring him right in the face.

One eye is already blackened—Joel got a little carried away. The sedative worked perfectly, but David has a punchable face. It took all he had not to keep going.

“Mornin’, sunshine,” says Joel as the kid slowly blinks awake, bleary and unfocused. “Eyes on me, now. Don't want you slippin’ away again.”

David only stares for a moment, gears grinding gently to life in his brain Once that animal instinct kicks in, the kid starts writhing against his restraints, bucking hard in Joel’s unrelenting grip. It's useless, of course. He’s tied by the wrists and ankles. Helpless.

Good.

“What—why the fuck… let me fucking go, man, please,” groans the kid.

“You made a mistake, David,” says Joel. “Think I’m gonna forget about that?”

David whimpers, flexing his hands subconsciously as pain undoubtedly prickles his scalp. Joel hasn't let go of his hair. “Please just let me go, man. I swear I didn't do anything. If you want money, I’ve got money.”

Joel smirks, a scoff slipping out. This is rich. The delectable flame licks up his throat again, indistinguishable from the pleasure of a good meal, a good fuck. It's craving. It’s darkness. He sinks deeper.

“You think it's manly to leave your date for your friends and leave her to find a way home herself? You think it's funny to treat her like a little toy and then leave her when you're done?” Joel sneers. “You didn't even call her back, David.”

He whines out another please, his ankles ineffectually kicking out. “I don't know what the fuck you're talking about. Just let me go. Fuck, it hurts.”

“You don't know,” says Joel, repeating it, slow and savoury, rolling it around in his mouth. “You wanna know the most insulting part, David? You don't even care. You made her upset, and you didn't get on your goddamn knees to beg her forgiveness. You didn't do everything in your fuckin’ power to get her back.” Joel brings the knife from his pocket and idly pushes the tip into David’s cheek. “You think she ain't worth that, David? Tell me the truth, now.”

David shrieks, hysterical, the terror and pain so fucking delicious that Joel gulps it down and yet still wants.

“Are you fucking kidding me? No bitch is fucking worth it. She was cute, but that's it, I swear. I didn't know she had a boyfriend. I wouldn't have—”

The knife digs, gouges, splitting skin and prodding muscle. Joel can feel the edge of the blade slot between the kid’s teeth. He howls, screaming for help to nobody that can help, not quite gone enough yet to realise his utter hopelessness. Joel will have to rectify that.

“Oh, I ain't her boyfriend yet,” Joel says calmly. “But I am hers, way she's mine. And you hurt what's mine. I can’t forget that.”

The knife retreats to admire its handiwork. The cheek is split, the edges jagged, spitting blood. The kid’s tears slip down his face and dip into the wound, salty enough to hurt. He screams and he cries and it’s beginning to get on Joel’s nerves.

“Please stop,” he cries, watching his assailant rear back and grip the knife tight, like an ice pick. “Please… fuck, please—!”

He’s getting real sick of that word. Please. A mere please can’t excuse the look he put on your face last night. A please will not absolve him of the cardinal sin.

No one—no one—makes you frown.

Joel sinks the knife into David’s knee, using both hands to drive it to the hilt. The kid’s face is ashen, white and grey as clouds rolling in, and his frail screams begin to peter out; he’s losing consciousness. Joel won’t have that—not until he’s finished.

“Stop whinin’, David. A real man falls in front of his woman and makes things right. A real man fixes what's broken. And a real man”—he twists the knife, gorging, glutting on the feeling of making amends on your behalf—“does everything in his power to show her he loves her.”

“Please…” The final, feeble attempt of a doomed man to return from the cliff’s edge.

Joel stands, adjusting his grip on the kid’s hair, and brings his knife just beneath his chin. When he drives it upward, he can see the shimmer of the blade through David’s slack, open mouth.

“I told you to stop whinin’.”

He’s in your bedroom again.

He felt the need calling to him, vibrating with a particular intensity he could not ignore. He rarely comes to see you twice in one night, but now that he's here, he knows it was the only way to settle his nerves.

You're asleep, lips parted against your pillow and a piece of hair fluttering in front of your face with every exhale. Joel approaches your bedside and tucks it safely behind your ear. You don't wake, but you hum sleepily, hugging your pillow closer. Joel smiles, satisfaction sinking deep and assured into his core. He's done right by you. You’ll go happily to him. Moth to a gemlike flame.

He wanders around the edge of the bed, gaze lazily indulging in your body as he goes. His cock twitches again with a need he cannot yet meet, the desire to move your panties aside and fill you with him. He does not. He kneels at your bedside, closest to where your legs have scissored apart beneath your sheets. The temptingly sweet call of that warm place between your thighs has Joel shifting your comforter aside and ghosting his fingers across the soft skin of your calf.

Your breathing deepens slightly, like you're sucking in a long mouthful of air, and then you settle. It's the only indication you give that you can feel his presence. And then it’s gone, and he’s hooking his fingers in the waistband of your pretty panties and bestowing upon himself what he's only seen through screens for months.

You're spread open and glistening, an indication of some preceding dream or fantasy playing out in that keen, busy mind. Your body is wholly pliant, so soft and glowing in the faint silvery light streaming in from the window, and it would be so easy to—

No. He will not taste you. If he does, he won’t stop. You need to trust him. There is blood on his hands that hasn’t yet washed clean, and he will not imprint those rust-red fingerprints on your body. You’re his world—what kind of man willingly imparts such pain onto a world he loves?

Some infinitesimal fractal lodged in Joel’s head obliged him to return to you tonight, to cleanse himself of the events that transpired under the illicit cover of night. The very sight of you reminds him what he’s doing this for. He crushes his nose into the wet spot that darkens your panties and inhales deeply, acquiring some sense of what you will taste like. The smell makes his head go fuzzy, intoxicated, tang and sweetness and impending gratification. In your sleep, you sigh, melting against the mattress.

Joel brings your panties back up over your pussy and thinks, Tomorrow.

THE TENANT

You're miserable when Joel knocks on your door the next day.

“He hasn't called me,” you tell him, letting yourself stew, sulking from the feeling of yet another man deciding you weren’t worth a follow-up phone call. “Am I repulsive? Am I a total freak? Is it something in my perfume?”

Joel looks down at you, lips parted as if on the precipice of a response, sweeping his gaze up and down your body. You’re wearing a simple sweater and skirt, but fuck, he can make you feel naked. His gaze penetrates deeper than flesh. It’s only then you realise he’s holding coffee.

Two cups of coffee.

“Oh, Joel,” you sigh, licking your bottom lip. “How did you know?”

“Lucky guess,” he says with a crooked smile, his voice a bit raspy, as if caught off-guard. He hands you your favourite drink—caramel macchiato, double espresso—from your favourite place down the block, and you could kiss him with how good it feels to hold the cool, condensation-slick cup in your hands. Your entire body deflates with the first sip.

“You’re my hero,” you tell him. “I mean it.”

Joel shakes his head fondly. “You got a funny sense of heroics.”

“They taste exactly like this,” you say playfully, tracing the rim of the plastic cup. “Thank you, Joel.”

He swipes his thumb across your chin. “It’s only coffee, baby.”

Since last night, something is inexplicably different. A new, once-forbidden boundary has been crossed. It may be technically inappropriate for your landlord to bring you coffee, touch you so intimately, call you baby. But it makes you feel like warm melting honey, and who is to say a feeling like that is wrong?

He’s wearing a blue T-shirt today. His hair is tousled like he slept on it, and your fingers tingle with the anticipatory sensation of how it would feel to take fistfuls of his locks in your hands. He’s stunning. And you catch yourself staring too late, tearing your gaze away the way one retracts their hand after burning it on the stovetop. Your heart skittering, you direct Joel to the sink and plan some excuse in your head for why it has miraculously fixed itself overnight.

But he doesn’t even spare a glance toward any of your appliances. He’s only looking at you.

“I got somethin’ else,” he says, almost shy, reaching into his pocket for a tiny box.

He grimaces when your eyes, wide and obviously panicked, meet his. “Jesus, I didn’t really think about how this looks. I’m not… proposin’, I swear.”

You both release a nervous laugh, but you cannot deny that your nerves are still fluttering at the sight of that simple suede box in his big hands.

He opens the lid and you gasp. It’s your necklace—the very same heart-shaped pendant you had been eyeing up at the festival. It’s shiny and polished and precisely, undeniably, the same one. “Oh my God,” you whisper, gently sliding your finger over the cool golden pendant. “It’s beautiful. Joel, how did you…”

“Turn around,” he says softly, the gentle direction guiding you better than any hand could. You obey, and Joel steps forward until his hard chest is flush to your back. He’s warm and sure and smells so good—cologne and coffee and mint and something potent, like iron—and all your questions fizzle to sparks in the air. You can no longer grasp for them. You reach out and you only find him.

His touch is careful. The heart-shaped pendant settles against your breastbone and shimmers in the afternoon light. Your chest briefly shimmers with the thought that you were made to wear this necklace. His large, rough hands ghost across the back of your neck as he secures the clasp, and you shiver. A single knuckle trails slowly down your spine, bumping every vertebrae on the way.

“It ain't your perfume.” His deep, grumbling voice is equivalent to the scratch of his beard against your temple as his jaw moves with each word. “And you're nothin’ close to repulsive. Look in that mirror and tell me what you see.”

There is a mirror, a full-length one by the entrance to your apartment, and it's surreal to watch your own body turn to face it, to watch yourself defer entirely to the man behind you. It feels nice to just let him steer you every which way.

“I see you,” you tell him, your hand lifting to the pendant on your throat. “And this.”

Joel clicks his tongue, his nose sliding up your temple. “What else do you see?”

You watch your lashes flutter, your head listing slightly to the side. “I see myself.”

“Hmm.” It’s a sound of approval, his palm now sliding around your waist and his arm banding across your body. He presses his hand to your hip bone and pulls you back against him. “Such a beautiful girl in that mirror. Ain't that right?”

“Joel, I…” You can feel his swelling erection prodding your ass and your head feels hazy with a heady, lustful desire you can no longer ignore or dismiss. “I don't think we should be…”

“No?” His mouth curves against your temple and you shiver at the coarse scratch of his moustache on your skin. It feels deliberate, premeditated. “I won’t tell a soul,” he murmurs, his thumb stroking your hip right where the hem of your sweater begins to inch upward. You can see a strip of your own bare stomach in the mirror. He’s making your eyes droop, your lashes flutter, your body light up from one nerve ending to the next, a closed circuit.

Oh, God. His touch is measured, gentle yet barely restrained. It is dipping a finger into the water just as it nears its boiling point. Months of staring and dreaming and retreating to your bed to touch yourself to thoughts of someone you cannot touch have led you here: his necklace, his gift to you, sitting prettily on your throat, his capable hands moulding you slowly to the shape of him. He’s touching you.

“You like me?” His voice rubs hard on your ears, sanding you down, smoothing the rough edges. He lets you linger on the precipice, a firm grip on your hand, letting you make the choice: to let go, or to reel yourself in.

“I like you,” you whisper, snapping the tether and plummeting to the warm, wet earth below.

You watch Joel’s eyes close in the mirror, something like a prayer falling from his lips. It does not take the shape of words—it is gruff and yet soft, hardly loud enough to discern over the ringing in your ears—but it’s so reverent that you can picture yourself falling to your knees at the sound of it.

His hand skims up your waist until he finds your throat, gently pinching your jaw so he can direct the turn of your head. You go easily, tilting your gaze back to rest your temple on his shoulder, as his other hand slides up from your hip to your ribs, grazing the underside of your breast. “You like me enough to touch you like this?”

You gasp, finding an anchor in the deep brown—nearly black, now—of his eyes. They’re warm but they’re dangerous; once you look, the cage door slides shut, and you’re trapped.

This must be one of your many dreams.

“Yes, Joel.”

“Mmm.” He smirks, teasing his tongue across his plush bottom lip. You watch the movement and feel yourself tightening, want want want a chorus in your ears. “You wanna kiss me, baby girl?”

Silently, you nod, your fingers gently sliding through his silky locks while your other hand seeks the strong balancing force of his shoulder. His smile sobers to a deep, stunning severity, and you cannot think to let it frighten you when you’re already slanting your mouth over his.

It starts slowly. His mouth is soft, his hands deftly returning the fervour with which you hold him, cupping the back of your neck with his other hand warming your ribs. A small gasp escapes you, and a rumble of satisfaction passes from his chest through yours, and it flips an ineffable switch inside him.

Joel turns you in his arms, his chest pressed to yours, his hand shooting out to brace against the wall as he walks you back toward it. Sufficiently cornered, you let your body melt into him, his palm now warming your lower back, his tongue feverishly seeking the seam of your lips. You let him pry you open, tasting the coffee and mint on his breath and inhaling the rich scent of him, sticking it with greedy hands to the walls of your brain. You’ll never tire of him, of this.

He kisses you like a glutton seeking more fulfilment, like an aesthete seeking that exhilarating, fleeting moment in time, desperate and unwavering and famished. Tongues slide together, hands grope and wander, fabrics shift. You can feel your sweater lifting at the same time your fingers finally find the hem of his T-shirt, but he beats you to the chase. You’re dizzy by the time he breaks away to remove your shirt, but you dutifully lift your arms to help him.

You seek his mouth again to resume the kiss, but Joel is decidedly feeling pious. He kisses his way down your throat, the necklace dangling from it, your sternum, your belly, sinking to his knees as he goes along. His hands are firm on your hips, squeezing, keeping you in place, while his mouth draws a map of you, eliciting the honeyed sensation of warm water dripping down your body.

“Oh, God,” you whisper, your head knocking back against the wall. It's so much. You've never been the object of attention quite like this, the marble statue at which the devout kneel, obsessive in their worship. You've never had a man fall to his knees to put his mouth all over you.

Has he wanted you as long as you’ve pined for him?

Joel grunts, his lips dragging open-mouthed kisses from one hip to another, his fingers hooking in the waistband of your skirt and yanking it down. You yelp, grasping his shoulders.

Joel only growls into your skin, his hands dropping to your ass and kneading you while he continues down past your hips. “So fuckin’ beautiful,” he grumbles. “So goddamn pretty. Don’t know how I waited this fuckin’ long. Jesus, baby girl, you're perfect. Goddamn perfect.”

His ramblings are poison. Every word infects, squeezing out your healthy cells, replacing them with the delicious scrape of fire against the ceiling of a room. The scratch of his beard. The sweet nurturing sound of his voice. The cared-for sensation of being kissed and touched and spoken to like you're someone worth a second date. Like you're worth the price of all the world and a couple stars, too.

And so the words slip out, shy and whisper-quiet and your cheeks burning hot enough to blister.

“Please, Daddy…”

Joel’s hands tighten on your body, a fractional movement that kicks up the frantic beating of your heart. He tilts his head back to gaze up into your eyes and you feel more naked with that single stare than ever before.

“That what you need, sweet thing?” he says, pressing his lips to your inner thigh. “You need Daddy to make you feel good?”

“Mhm,” you whine, the pitch of your voice pathetic and needy. You watch him crush his nose into your inner thigh, nipping at your sensitive flesh, and his name leaves your mouth in a sob.

“‘m gonna need words,” he commands, biting you again in reproach. “Talk to me, baby girl. Tell me what you want.”

“I want you to make me come,” you plead, grasping his soft greying hair in your fingers. “Please.”

“You gonna call me what you wanna call me?” he prompts, smacking your thigh. “C’mon, baby, lemme hear it.”

“Daddy!” you cry out, your hand tightening in his locks. “Fuck, Daddy, please make me come.”

Joel growls, bringing your soaked panties down your legs. Your knees nearly knock together, but he’s shouldering his way between them, bringing one up onto his wide shoulder. You're spread open like this, bared plainly for your landlord to feast upon at his will. The sight of his lips parted, waiting and ready to take your pussy into his mouth, has you trembling.

He gives a slow, experimental lick, sliding the flat of his tongue through your wet slit. You shudder, your head lolling against the wall. One teasing drag of his tongue and you’re butter, humming and whimpering for more, Daddy, please as he takes his fucking time tasting what you have to offer.

“Goddamn sweet,” he grumbles, his blunt nails digging crescent moons into the flesh of your ass, pulling your body flush to him. “Waited so fuckin’ long for this.” You watch the fire ignite from red- to blue-hot in Joel’s eyes, his gaze shuttering as he loses himself, devoted entirely to the process of unravelling you.

The next time he dips his tongue between your folds, he does it deliberately, calculated, as if he has already memorised your shape and now seeks to pry you open. He parts your lips to make way for his mouth, hot and soft against your clit. Softly, you cry out, watching as he presses a featherlight kiss to your pearl. You try to grind against his face, needing more, but a resounding slap to your ass stops you dead.

“No takin’ what I don’t give,” he says. “You understand me?”

You pout, but you nod your head anyway.

He decides it isn’t good enough and abruptly takes your clit between his teeth in a scolding bite.

“Repeat. It.”

“I’ll only take what you give,” you tell him. “I’ll be good.”

Apparently satisfied, he hums, diving back in and finally—finally—sucks on your needy clit. “Oh!” He’s eager, sure, but he’s practised. He’s meticulous in the way he applies pressure to your clit, lapping at you greedily and pulling back to draw your pleasure into measured tidal waves. You crest only to recede from shore, and then his lips suction to you again, his hand snaking around to your front and pressing down on your lower belly.

“Fuck!” you squeak, your stomach tightening as the dizzying pleasure overcomes you. “Joel, I’m gonna—!”

The orgasm pulls you under, drowning you with a forceful hand, your lungs sucking in mouthfuls of air. You seize, your heel digging into Joel’s muscled back, your fingers fisting his hair, your cunt clenching desperately around nothing, begging to be filled. Joel keeps his mouth on you all the while, licking you through your high, and you think it’s a benevolent act until your orgasm gently fades and he continues to make out with your pussy as if it never happened.

“Ah! Joel, please—” It’s so much. Too much; your pussy contracts relentlessly at the endless attention from his tongue, happily licking your clit and relishing the faint throbbing underneath it. It’s like he’s starved. His eyes are closed, his beard glistening with your wetness, his fingers dimpling your flesh as he pulls you right along to another high.

Two thick fingers gather up the juices you’ve leaked onto your thighs and push them back into your hole, insistent in their desire to enter. You gasp, your heart in your fucking throat: “That’s only two?”

He chuckles, but the vibration only makes you jump, letting his fingers sink inside your cunt to the knuckle. “Oh, fuck, fuck, Daddy, that feels so good, please make me come again, I need it, please—!”

Joel groans into your pussy, curling his fingers toward him so they press against a spongy spot inside you that sends your head spinning, your mind folding in on itself. All you know is the next orgasm, the best way to get him to give it to you, the fastest way to reach that indelible place once more, just once more—

Joel’s hand applies more pressure to your belly, and you scream, clawing desperately at his shoulder as you give yourself over to something much, much stronger than an orgasm. It’s foreign, the creeping sensation of an invader taking up residence in your body. You cannot see, cannot hear. It assumes control, tearing a cry from your mouth and locking all your limbs tight and splashing your wetness all over Joel’s chin, beard, shirt.

You think he only stops because you begin to list; he catches you around the hips and presses a soft kiss to your used little clit. “Mmmmm,” is vaguely how you manage to thank him, your eyes peeling slowly open.

“I know, baby girl,” he says, stroking your hip bone with his thumb. He litters kisses all over your thighs, coaxing you through the minute twitching of your muscles as they relax. “You did so good for me, pretty girl. So fuckin’ beautiful. My sweet girl.”

You shiver in his grasp, watching as he makes his way back up your body. He swipes his forearm across his wet beard and you moan a little at the sight. “Nobody’s ever…”

Joel crowds you, his hand cupping the back of your neck so he can guide your gaze up to him. “That's what you don't understand, sweetheart,” he says. “You can try to find another man to make you happy, but he won't be me. I’m the only one who’s gonna treat you right.”

“Joel…” Sense begins to push at the edges of your brain, but you only slump further into his touch, letting him secure your hair behind your ear. “This isn't right,” you whisper. “I pay you every month to live here. People will know. People will talk about me.”

“People have suffered worse for a hell of a lot less.”

You have no time to decode his words because he grabs your hand and presses your palm over his chest. Beneath the shirt and the warm, tanned skin, you feel a strong, rapid heartbeat, hammering away at his ribs. He maintains eye contact, the gaze incisive, peering right into the cluster of wiring inside your head that calls his name. “You feel my heart and you tell me this ain't real. You think this ain't love? You think it's obsession? Infatuation? Think I can’t see you lookin’ at me the way you do?”

His words pin you to the ground. They’re possessive, covetous—jealous. He wants you, and he knows you want him. All these months, he’s wanted you the way you’ve craved him; all the comforts and the roses and the baked goods in lieu of payment for substantial repair jobs; the times he’s let slide some late payments because I know it’s tough sometimes, the inexplicable kindnesses in your everyday.

Joel Miller dedicated himself to you the second you arrived to see the prospective apartment.

“You’re mine,” he says, his thumb stroking your jaw. “And I wanna hear you say it.”

People will call you a whore. They’ll think you’re pimping yourself out for cheaper rent. They’ll send you filthy looks. But the man in front of you makes you feel wanted. Desired. You’re better than all the dates that failed. You’re better than a shitty boss who won’t give you the raise you deserve. Joel is good to you. He’s always been.

“I’m yours, Joel Miller,” you say, resting your forehead against his. “Now please take me to bed.”

He grins, taking your hand and leading you to your bedroom. You get grabby straight away, fingering the hem of his shirt with a pleading look in your eye. You can still see the evidence of your orgasm staining the collar. “You can take it off, baby,” he says with that cocky smile, letting you lift the shirt over his head. In the sunlight, the grey in his hair shimmers, and his chest is bared to you. You lick your lips, placing your hands on his broad shoulders just to feel the way your palms contour to his dips and curves.

You lean in and put your lips to his neck, tracing the shape of him down to the hollow of his throat, He tastes faintly of fresh air and sweat, and he smells like you. Your hands admire the warmth and strength underneath them, his body so tangible when only yesterday it was a distant dream. He lets you indulge, though his hands flex at his sides, and your fingers fumble with his belt buckle.

“Help,” you mumble against his chest, bumping your nose into him. Joel chuckles, relieving you of your burden and shucking off his belt. It clinks along the floor somewhere nearby, and you can unbutton his jeans to bring them down, freeing his hard, throbbing cock.

Your mouth waters at the sight. He’s thick and slightly curved, the tip leaking precum onto his belly, his balls heavy with the need to come. During those long nights after long days of work, you would imagine, for hours on end, what lingered just below his belt; the little trail of hair leading down his soft belly to your destination; the way his wide shoulders would bracket your body, shelter you from all the tough shit you could possibly suffer. You would picture all the ways you could thank him. You bite your bottom lip and ready yourself to sink to your knees, but Joel is having none of it. He attacks your mouth, kissing you deeply, his hands sliding up your back as if he's trying to count every vertebrae. He doesn't relent even when your knees hit the edge of the bed and you collapse backward onto the mattress. He only crawls over you and pins you beneath his hard body.

“So pretty like this,” he says, lowering his head and nudging your chin upward with his nose to give himself better access to your throat. He sucks and nips at you all the way down, pausing at your heaving breasts. His fingers gently toy with one stiff nipple while his mouth occupies itself with the other, teasing it with his tongue and his teeth. You moan softly, content to watch him explore your body, squeezing your tits before he migrates downward.

“Daddy,” you whisper, stroking his hair away from his face, your head falling back onto the pillows as his fingers part your folds once more. “Fuck, please, touch me. I need you inside me.”

Joel settles in between your open legs and takes his cock in his hand. You mewl for him, determined in the face of his big cock to fit it nicely inside you. “Mmm, you ready for me, baby girl? You need Daddy to fill you up, use you like a pretty little toy?”

You’re nodding frantically, the words igniting you. “Please take me.”

Joel slaps the head of his cock against your clit, once, twice, watching your thighs twitch. Spreading the slick wetness from your pussy onto the tip, he finally guides himself to your hole and notches just inside.

“Jesus,” he utters. “Jesus, you're a fuckin’ dream.”

“It’s real,” you pant, “I’m real.”

He begins to disappear inside you, wrenching you open, your poor pussy disused from going so long without decent sex. You feel the pinching pain give way to a delicious pressure in your core as he eases into you, taking it slow despite his taut jaw, his gritted teeth. Your cunt forms a tight seal around his length, your arousal lubricating his entry, and you feel lightheaded. He’s so fucking big—and he’s still going.

“Oh, my… Joel—”

“I know, baby.” He brings his thumb to your clit and helps you relax with every circular swipe. “I know what y’like.”

You keen up against him, your thighs squeezing his hips. He's only halfway inside you and it feels like being filled up to your throat, choking on the air you breathe. Your head falls back, your hands flying up to your tits and squeezing.

“Daddy…”

One of Joel’s hands overlaps yours where it grasps your breast. “That’s my girl. You can take me. Always knew you could.” Still, he's panting with the exertion of holding back.

“You thought about me?” you say coyly, trying to pull him deeper inside you. He obliges, if only because you're being so petulant, and his hips finally knock into yours. You release a bone-deep sigh of relief.

“All I do”—his hips thrust shallowly, baring his teeth as he paws at your thighs—“is think about you.”

You cry out at the angle, the depth he reaches, how thick and heavy he sits inside you. Your pussy sucks him in, begging for more, and Joel obliges by hooking his hand in the back of your knee and pushing your thigh toward your chest.

Your vision whites, a ragged cry leaving your mouth. “Oh, fuck! Yes, yes, yes, that feels so good—”

“‘s right, baby girl. I’m the only one’s gonna fuck you this good,” Joel grits out, dragging his thick cock along your walls, spreading you open, forcing himself to fit. The head of his cock kisses your cervix with every thrust, measured in their intensity, just enough to drive you up the goddamn wall but never enough to sting. “I’m the only one you want.”

Your mouth is open and his pounding urges a steady rush of ah, ah, ahs up your throat. Joel leans over you and tilts your head back with a hand in your hair to slant his mouth over yours. He lets you pour your cries into his mouth and he swallows them down, fucking you so hard that your hips begin to ache.

He smatters your jaw with sloppy kisses. You lift your hand to his face and trace the patches in his beard, your brows drawn together in your perpetual haze.

“I dreamed about you,” you whisper, taking his earlobe between your teeth to make him growl against your skin. “Touched myself thinking about you.”

“I know,” he says, his hips grinding hard against yours, rubbing up against your used clit. He answers your gasp by nibbling your throat, and you keep him fixed to you with your hand at the back of his neck. His soft hair is matted with sweat and you want to bury yourself here, etch the shape of him into your stone. He's strong, capable, so present in this moment that your heart begins to throb to the beat of his.

Joel surges upward and takes you with him, forcing you to sit on his lap. At this angle, his cock reaches deeper, somehow, your mouth falling open and your forehead dropping to his shoulder. His palm is a soothing presence on your sweaty back as he tells you things that make you flush from your chest to your ears.

“Thought about takin’ you on the goddamn bar last night,” he grunts, guiding your ass in a rolling rhythm along his lap, his cock gliding slowly along your walls. You moan, your thighs shaking around his hips. “Thought about spreadin’ you over my desk and fuckin’ you dumb with my cock.”

You sob into the crook of his neck, grinding down on his cock, the pressure of his navel against your clit sparking hot in your lower belly. “What else?” you ask, nipping at the strong muscle where his shoulder meets his neck. Your tits are pressed up against his chest, his warmth engulfing you, your body slowly lowering over him as he guides you the way he likes.

His palm coasts down your spine until he finds your puckered asshole. His name is jagged and rubbed raw on your tongue.

“Shhh, baby girl.” The pad of his finger teases your hole with just enough pressure to ooze electric ecstasy down your spine. “Feels good, doesn't it?”

Fuck, his voice is so gentle, so knowing. You curl your fingers in his hair, your nose tickled by the locks that curl over his ears.

“Mmmhmm,” you mewl, lifting your hips as best you can despite the growing aches, telegraphing your desire to be touched by him—played with.

“Thaaat’s it,” he coos, his nose nudging your cheek as he turns his head. His finger continues to prod your asshole while his hips buck up into you. “Openin’ up for me like a good girl. You’d let me take you wherever I want, hmm? Whenever I want?”

“Yes, Daddy, yes,” you moan, your mouth perpetually open against the skin of his neck. You can’t think. You can't breathe. You can only drink down mouthfuls of him and let your body succumb to the delicious weight of his cock inside you. “Yes, I’ll be your little slut. I’ll be whatever you want. You make me feel so good.”

He seems pleased with your babbling, grinning into your cheek as he keeps you spread wide and pounds up into you. His finger continues to tease your tight hole until he feels your body contract around him and apparently decides that he isn't quite through with you.

“Turn around. Hands and knees.”

Who are you to refuse?

You lament the brief loss of his cock as you shift into your knees, resting your forearms on the bed and teasing him with a wiggle of your ass. Joel hums appreciatively, sidling up behind you and grinding his hard cock between your asscheeks. You jolt forward, but he catches you around the waist and warms his palm at your ribs.

Something warm and wet lands in a glob on your asshole, and you realise he fucking spit on you. Your head spins, dizzied by your own arousal, and soon, the warm, wet head of his cock slips back inside your hole, and you relish the refuge of being taken by him all over again.

“You wanna know what else?” He begins to fuck you hard and fast and almost angry in its intensity. His thrusts knock against your ribcage and rattle the bars, your heart floundering for a way back to the surface. “I thought about knockin’ on your door every goddamn day and putting my dick in this pretty fuckin’ pussy. Thought about your tight fuckin’ body every single time I saw you walk by and a long time after. I thought about the noises you'd make and Jesus, I was right. So goddamn sweet.”

You’re drooling onto the pillow, your eyes rolling back in your head, your fingers uselessly clasping handfuls of your white sheets. Joel is an animal, mounting you from behind and taking you hard, deep, the slick squelching noises of your coupling so crude and indecent that they burn through your ears like a lit fuse. It's wrong. You never should have kissed him. But wrong shouldn't feel like this.

Wrong shouldn’t taste like mint and coffee, shouldn't smell like roses and sawdust. Wrong shouldn’t feel like his cock sitting snug inside your pussy, some obscene jigsaw, seeping saplike pleasure down your spine.

This must be right.

His hands are rapacious, one wrapping around your hair and the other guiding the bend of your back, arching you perfectly to fit him while he takes you the way he likes. “Such a tease in those pretty dresses. Such a prim and proper girl ‘til she gets the right dick. You’ll get on your knees for this dick, baby girl, won't you? You’ll beg for it like a goddamn whore.”

“I will!” you moan, your cheek pressed into the mattress. The force of his thrusts have you travelling up the bed in minuscule movements, his thighs slapping hard against yours. “Fuck, I will, Daddy! Please, Daddy, I wanna make you feel good, I’ll do anything.”

“You're doin’ such a good job already, sweet thing,” he says, using his leverage on your hair and your waist to yank you upright, his chest pressed to your back, your ass now firmly sat in his lap. You moan long and low at the new angle, your back arching and your toes curling.

Joel groans against your jaw, his mouth travelling along the line of it in sloppy kisses that indicate he's about as close as you are. “Yeah, baby. Fuckin’ drunk on my cock. Fucked you good and dumb, hmm? Fucked you so good you can't even think.”

You can only manage a low whine, the sound of it a fleeting puff of air from your lips, the oxygen in your lungs depleting and replaced with the smell of him. You try to bounce on his dick—you really do try—but you cannot remember how to work the muscles in your thighs. You cannot remember what you had for breakfast nor the colour of the skirt you wore today. You can only vaguely understand the shape of the man behind you, the name that belongs to him, the way you curve and fit into him. You’re falling, the technicolour world outside your window fading to the sound of soft, beating wings—that may be your heart, fluttering in your ears—as you seize, yielding to the pleasure.

You will not recall the sounds you make when you come, grasping blindly at his thighs to keep yourself from falling over, your ears ringing. You feel his moustache scratching your jaw and his cock working you through your high, slowing his thrusts to help you land softly on solid ground. You may cry out his name, and you may call him something else entirely. But it's vibrant. It's radiant as the sunlight now dipping behind the distant buildings. It tastes just as sweet as the golden hour.

Joel does not stop fucking you when your body goes limp in his arms. No, he resumes his brutal pace, using you like a fucking toy to get himself off. You happily take it, your head lolling back against his shoulder and your eyes drooping.

“Nnh, fuck… I’m gonna… Jesus—oh, fuck—”

His hips press flush to your ass and he nuzzles his face into your throat, depositing kisses and love bites all over your skin as he pumps shallowly into you, his hot cum filling you up and leaking generously around the seal of your cunt. You gasp, your fingers threading through his already-tousled hair, keeping him glued to you as he flexes against your body and comes hard enough to double himself over.

He collapses on top of you, forcing you to bend at the hip, little puffs of air escaping his mouth and seeping into you. You whine, your sore hips battered and bruised, your pussy deliciously abused as you pulse continuously around his dick. “Joel, please…”

He comes slowly back into his body, his lips trailing down your spine as he lifts himself upright. “Shit. ‘m sorry, baby girl. You feel okay?”

You hum happily, letting yourself pant into the mattress. “Feels so good.”

Joel pulls out, savouring the tight drag of his cock out of your pussy, hissing through his teeth and watching his thick cum dribble slowly out of your hole. “Such a fuckin’ pretty sight. My sweet girl, all used up.”

You drop your face into your forearm and giggle. Joel smooths his hand over your lower back. “What's so funny?”

“Just…” You sound a bit hysterical as you continue to laugh. “I’m going to be late on rent this month. I put a down payment on a car.”

Joel lowers himself next to you and gently pulls you into him, his moustache tickling your cheek. “Planning on gettin’ the hell outta dodge?” he says playfully, nipping your earlobe.

Your eyes droop and you sink into him. “Think I’ll stay here for a while.”

“I know you will, baby,” he murmurs.

“Joel?”

“Hmm.”

“Thank you for the necklace.”

It’s night when you next wake, and Joel is next to you.

For someone so stern and strong, he looks utterly serene in his sleep. His lips are slightly parted, half his face pressed into the pillow, his hair curling around his ears and his arm lazily draped over you. You gently sweep a lock of hair away from his face.

Through the dark, the red light beams, and the arm around your waist tugs you closer.

THE END.

#kiwisbell's fics #pedro pascal #joel miller #the last of us #joel miller x female reader #joel miller fic #joel miller x reader #joel miller x f!reader #dark!joel x reader #dark!joel miller #joel miller smut #joel miller x you #tlou hbo

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save-the-villainous-cat · 15 days

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Could you do uh some story about villain who betrayed hero but then regretted it, and hero hates his guts for it? I just want to see the world burn.

If u don't want to , that's fine, love ur writing, keep shining queen

“You…” The tears in the hero’s eyes blurred their vision and their mind alike. Their hand shook around the blade as they tried to let their own weight the work, instead of actively pushing it into the villain’s chest.

But the villain was just as determined as always, just as strong. None of them were happy about the situation. The hero saw it in their eyes.

Why did it have to come to this?

“I’m sorry,” the villain whispered and the hero could feel how their resistance weakened. Their weapon was already slicing up the villain’s suit.

For the first time, the hero didn’t have a plan. Their mind was full of rage and urged them to finish the job.

With the villain out of the picture, these feelings would go away. They would be able to sleep at night, they would be able to move on and get into a relationship. They wouldn’t dread the hours.

But they couldn’t. They couldn’t kill them, no matter how intense their pain was. They couldn’t kill this person who had shared a bed with them. Who had cared for them. Who had loved them.

Right before the blade could cut through flesh, the hero cursed and tossed it away. Tears of rage and grief ran down their cheeks and they could barely form any words as they sat on top of the villain and broke down into a million pieces.

Their tears fell onto the villain’s chest as their trembling fingers clawed at the villain’s suit. They wanted to make them suffer, they wanted to make them feel the kind of pain that they had experienced, that they were still going through.

But the hero knew violence wouldn’t ease their mind.

“Leave,” the hero said eventually. Their voice was shaking. “You have to leave.”

“Please, I am sorry. I didn’t lie about my feelings for you.” The villain’s voice was calm and calculated as so often but the hero could hear the little bit of desperation that came through.

“No, you have to leave.” The hero dried their tears with their sleeves. It was as if their heartstrings snapped. That kind of pain was completely different from all the wounds the hero was used to. Torn flesh and broken bones — all of that didn’t even come close to what they were feeling now.

“I am sorry, okay? I am sorry for lying. I’ve fallen for you, I cannot help it. I wasn’t supposed to but I did and I — I think about you and I miss you and it wasn’t supposed to be like this, okay!?” The hero shook their head.

“Leave the city,” they said. They had no other choice.

“No,” the villain said. Their eyes widened and instead of their calm demeanour, they panicked. They sat up and the hero stood up, ready to go. For the umpteenth time, their heart squeezed together until blood dropped. “I won’t leave you a second time. I don’t care if you stab me to death or poison me or beat me. I don’t care if you torture me. I won’t go. I will stay with you this time. I will make it up to you. Whatever you want. Tell me what to do and I will obey.”

“I don’t want you here,” the hero answered. “If you love me, you’ll be gone by tomorrow. You will never come back.”

“No, please.” The villain stood up and reached for the hero. Their hands found the hero’s forearms and for a second, the hero was back in their bedroom, waking up next to them. They were stitching up each other’s wounds. They were kissing at the kitchen table.

The hero pushed them away.

“You’re not welcome here anymore.”

“You know as well as I that we belong together,” the villain said. Despite the shock in their eyes, they seemingly tried to keep it together. To use reason instead of emotions. The hero cursed themselves. Even when they hated them, they knew them. They knew every single habit, every single detail. “This will haunt you.”

“You already do.” The hero paused and took one last look at the villain. “Don’t you ever come back.”

#kinda hate this but wtvr #BAM EXILED #writing snippet #heroxvillain prompt #heroxvillain snippet #heroes and villains #hero #villain #hero x villain #heroxvillain #an answer for an ask #request #angst

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gavisfanta · 3 months

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Hello :) could you do a story where Fermin come home from practice and he is clingy/ can’t stop kissing the reader ? Please :)

THOUSAND TIMES - FERMIN

summary: fermin comes home from practice and you see his soft side again

warnings: none

a/n: shorter story but its cutee

Fermin was at practice, the house was empty and you missed his touch.

Not in a sexual way, quite the opposite.

The two of you have only been dating for a short time so you're still very "lovey dovey" as Gavi likes to call it.

You always laughed at him, however, he was right somehow.

The beginning of relationships are always very affectionate and shy, then you grow closer and get a bit more comfortable around eachother.

Even tho Gavi has never been in a relationship before, he somehow gives the best advice about love and relationships.

Fermin and you can thank Gavi your whole relationship, he was the one who interduced you to eachother.

Gavis and your family have known eachother for years and of course every week there was a party at one's house.

Usually it was theirs, Gavi and you were close immediately, since you two went to school together it was easy for you two to get along.

As Gavi got older he started playing football more intensively. The two families often met up to go and watch Gavi's game where you saw Fermin for the first time.

On the field however he looked very scary to you, might had to do something with the age difference between you two.

Two years now isn't much, but it used to be back then. So whenever Gavi was hanging out with Fermin, you stuck with Aurora, playing with her.

After a few years, when you and Gavi were both 18, he decided to interduce you two, he felt like you and Fermin would get along well because your personalities were quite similar.

Gavi wasn't exactly wrong but the things between you and Fermin didn't work out at first. Provoking, pushing and fighting were the perfect words to describe your 'friendship' with Fermin.

The day that changed whatever was going on between the two of you was a party you three went on.

Let's just say the night ended with you being in Fermins bed with hickeys all over your body and no clothes on.

Then the day after the party was rather awkward than comforting, because of what was supposed to be a one night stand between friends turned into much more.

Gavi couldn't stop laughing as soon as he found out that his childhood bestfriend had hooked up with his other childhood bestfriend.

For the two of you it was pure horror, Gavi made you two hang out the entire time and after some while you discovered that you had feelings for him.

Now you were standing there, waiting for him to come home from practice.

To your surprise in that seconds as you thought about him the front door opened.

"Amor I'm home." Fermins voice echoed throught the house as the door closed shut.

"Finally" You said and walked over to him and hugged him. Fermin wrapped his hands arpund your lower waist and hid his face in the crook of your neck.

"I missed you." His warm breath on your neck sent shivers down your spine. Wrapping your arms tighter around his neck he smiled a bit.

"Let's go and lie down. I'm so tired." He mumbled and you couldn't help but smile at his soft voice, he was always so sensitive after practice and you loved when he wasn't so cocky.

Although you found him so hot when he was cocky it was good to see Fermins other side for an evening.

So as you and Fermin walked up to your bedroom he followed behind you, he couldn't leave his hands off of you andas you fell onto the bed he hid his face in the crook of his neck and started planti g sloppy kisses on your neck again.

He pulled down your black shirt a bit so that he could kiss your collar bone.

You giggled as he started sucking on your sweet spot while you started scratching his back with your acrylics.

He moaned against your neck and you couldn't help but smile while you pulled up his shirt so that you could scratch his bare back.

"I love you Y/n, did I ever tell you that?" He mumbled as he pushed himself over you and put his head on your chest.

"A couple of times." You smiled as you watched the soft side of Fermin being all clingy with you.

"It seems like not enough." Fermin said and stood on all fours over you, then he grabbed your waist and pulled you further down on the bed. You just watched his face as he then dived into your neck and took his hands to tickle your stomach.

"Fer- stop-" You laughed as he kissed your neck and you couldn't stop laughing.

Then after like 5 minutes of you just laughing and him admiring the way you moved and the way your eyes looked he finally stopped.

You breathed heavily and Fermin then leaned down to kiss you on the lips. You melted into him as you finally relaxed after being so tensed up from laughing all the time.

Fermin hummed as you ran your hand through his hair while his lips were still on yours. Then he pulled away and you looked into his eyes. Those brown eyes you could get lost in for years.

"I love you and I'll tell you a thousand more times if i need to."

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illiterateaffairs · 11 months

Text

DISTRACTIONS V | A SLIGHT MALFUNCTION

pairing: jamie tartt x f!reader (ted lasso)

rating: T

word count: 5,901

summary: afc richmond is off to amsterdam for an exhibition match, but the problem with going on a trip with the team is that jamie is on the team. poor guy just wants to know what he did wrong.

A/N: if someone is out of character in this chapter, no they aren’t. pretend i’m a perfect writer!

distractions masterlist | previous chapter

So you’re definitely screwed - and not in a fun way.

The evening when Jamie came over to share pizza and watch Grey’s Anatomy with you ended with him spending the night. It was the first time he did so without sex being involved. The worst part was that you initiated it. You both let time get away from you - and Jamie became very invested in Meredith and Derek’s tumultuous relationship - so you told him he could crash since it was so late. You’d offered timidly, fearing he’d think it was weird since this wasn’t your usual routine. But he didn’t even hesitate in agreeing, and you didn’t turn him away when he followed you to your bedroom.

Something shifted between the two of you after that. You actually felt like the friends part of your friends with benefits situation carried more weight. Now when he came over, instead of immediately jumping each other’s bones, you shared a meal, watched a show, or even played a game after Jamie noticed the few board games you had stowed away in your closet.

And you talked more, too. He started telling you stories about his family; how close he and his mom were, and the strained relationship between him and his father. He never went into much detail, but you could gather that his dad was definitely not a great person. You liked that he trusted you enough, though, to let you in on even a tiny bit of his struggles. It made you understand him better. Naturally, you also started sharing more with him, such as how lost you felt before coming to the U.K. You’d confided in him about the lack of friends you had back in Chicago, since Mason practically isolated you from the world outside of his own, and how insecure that made you. “Well, now you’ve got a whole football club who’d do just about anything for you,” he’d whispered, gently running a finger across your cheek as the two of you laid in bed.

At one point you almost told him a funny story about your childhood that involved Ted, but you bit your tongue and gave your uncle a fake name. Jamie cackled, though, as you described your Uncle Steve’s attempt at helping you with a science fair project that ended with baking soda shooting out of your fake volcano and into his eye. When you caught yourself musing that Jamie’s laugh must be the greatest sound in the whole world, you knew you were in trouble.

You were fucking screwed. You and Jamie agreed: no feelings. The second one of you felt weird or that you didn’t want casual sex anymore, you’d stop. You never discussed what would happen if one of you felt more, because it seemed implausible. Yet, here you were.

The obvious solution was to call it off. Jamie probably wouldn’t care. On to the next. But the selfish part of you couldn’t do it. He was just so cute and sweet and he made you feel good. And not just in bed - in general. When you were around him, you felt confident and happy and safe. Mason, at least towards the end, made you feel anxious and inept and small.

Maybe that was why you were feeling so over attached. You were used to the bare minimum from a guy, that now that a decent one was showing you attention and kindness, you were obsessing over him.

But Jamie wasn’t just decent, he was…Jamie. And despite every bone in your body telling you not to, you really liked him.

So, over the course of the last few days, you did what any reasonable person would do: ignore the problem until it just goes away. Unfortunately, the problem was Jamie and he was a little hard to ignore, since you worked with him. But you did your best to put some distance between the two of you. When he wanted to come over, you told him you had plans with Sam or Keeley. When he wanted to sneak away to your office, you told him Rebecca needed you. When he showed up at your flat with takeout from the Chinese restaurant you’d offhandedly mentioned loving once, to which he remembered, you fucked him on the couch and ate cold lo mein afterwards. But that was your only moment of weakness.

You told yourself you couldn’t avoid him forever; just long enough for your feelings to dissipate. You were just in some sort of honeymoon phase, and once the novelty of him wears off, you can be normal about everything, until you both inevitably get bored of each other and move on. It was never meant to last forever.

You have to ignore the way your heart aches at that thought.

It’s because of your fool proof plan to get over Jamie that you decide not to attend Richmond’s exhibition match in Amsterdam this weekend. Something you hadn’t told Jamie, or anyone for that matter. Which is why you’re starting to feel particularly awkward as Ted sits across from you at your desk and goes on and on about the trip.

“I was thinking when we get there, we could grab breakfast and sight-see for a bit before the game. Maybe Beard will tag along. What do you think?”

You’re pushing a piece of chicken around your plate absentmindedly when Ted looks up at you, and furrows his brows.

“What’s wrong, Kiddo?” he asks, setting his own plate onto your desk.

You look up, with wide eyes, “Who, me? Nothings wrong. I’m great! Fucking fantastic.”

He tilts his head, fixing you a look.

Your shoulders drop as you sigh, “I just…don’t think I’m going to go to Amsterdam this weekend.”

Ted’s eyes widen in shock, “What? Why not? I thought you’d be excited! New country, new adventures. You know, Amsterdam is one step closer to Iceland.”

You huff out a laugh as you rub your temple. “I know, and I do want to. I’ve just been feeling kind of run down lately. I feel like life's been kind of go, go, go since I got here. Which has been great! But it’s catching up with me and I think I just need to unwind for a weekend by myself.”

While this isn’t exactly the truth, life has been a bit hectic, so you hope he buys it. Ted nods thoughtfully, as though he wants to ask more, but accepts your answer.

This time you tilt your head and give him a pointed look, “What?”

“Nothing,” Ted’s quick to respond, “What you said makes sense. I guess I just haven’t checked in on how you’ve been coping with everything. You’ve seemed so happy since you’ve been here. You and Sam seem to get along real well, and Rebecca always sings your praises. But you are thousands of miles away from the only home you’ve ever known. Heck, I’ve been here for almost three years, and I still sometimes wake in a cold sweat craving barbeque sauce.” Ted smiles when you giggle. “All I’m saying is it's okay to miss home; to miss your parents, even to miss he-who-shall-no be named.”

You're surprised when, despite Ted avoiding his name, the allusion to Mason doesn’t make your head spin. You snort, “Well, while I do miss my dads and deep dish pizza, I can assure you I do not miss Voldemort.”

Ted hums, “That’s good.”

“You’re right, though. I honestly have really loved my life here these past few months, but I think I made myself skip the part where I processed all the changes. So, I think some time to just be will be good for me.”

“I think so, too,” he nods, “But the team and I sure will miss you this weekend.”

You don’t have time to bask in the sentiment when a knock comes through your office door. Before you can respond, the door opens to reveal Jamie.

You swear time stops for a second, as Jamie looks from you to Ted, and Ted looks from Jamie to you. You just blink, practically staring into the abyss. You know Jamie is scrambling for an excuse as to why he’s here, as you try to rationalize why either one of them is in your office. Thankfully, Ted has more than one brain cell and is able to play it cool.

“Hey, Jamie, what brings you here?” Ted greets cheerfully.

“I’m, uh, here to ask if I can see the videos we got today at practice.” Jamie makes up and you’re almost proud, “I have to make sure my public image is maintained.”

“Yes, he’s very stringent about that.” You add on, giving Ted a playful eye roll about Jamie’s ‘antics’, and he’s none the wiser. Ted gives you an amused smile.

The older man gets up and starts gathering trash into the takeout bag to dispose of. “Well, I should get going. Thanks for dinner, Kiddo. Don’t tell Roy, but this is why you’re my favorite coworker.” Ted turns to you in the doorway and winks from behind Jamie. He pats the younger man on the shoulder, and as he leaves, shouts back, “Good night, you two.”

Jamie shuts the door behind him, “Do you have dinner with Ted often?”

You shrug, “Sometimes.”

Jamie nods, and you’re relieved neither of them were suspicious of anything. You’re still overwhelmed by the two of them crossing paths like that, that you’re late to processing that you and Jamie are alone in your dimly lit office which is exactly the type of situation you’re trying to avoid. However, Jamie doesn’t initiate anything like you’d expected. Instead, he flops down into the chair across from you, almost dejectedly. He beats you to the punch before you can ask.

“Why aren’t you coming to Amsterdam?”

That takes you aback, “You heard that?” You glance briefly in the direction Ted disappeared in, “Did you hear anything else?”

“No,” Jamie frowns, “I got here right when Ted said the team would miss you.”

You hold back a relieved sigh.

“We will miss you, by the way,” Jamie adds, “Me especially.”

Your stomach flutters. What the hell did that mean?

“Really?” you ask quietly.

“Yeah,” Jamie nods, “Hotels are the best places to have sneaky sex.”

You scoff and roll your eyes, honestly grateful he’d snapped you out of your stupor.

“Sure they are. Especially when you’re sharing a room with one of your teammates.”

“Well, I could get us our own room. A private suite. Maybe with a jacuzzi tub.” Jamie reaches across the table, taking your hand and rubbing it gently with his thumb. “That is, if you come with us this weekend.

You stare longingly at your intertwined fingers and he almost has you. Luckily, you have a miniscule shred of willpower left.

“I’m sorry, Jamie,” you reluctantly pull your hand from his, “I really need to stay in Richmond this weekend. I need some time to relax.”

“Well, I could help you do that,” Jamie scoffs.

“Jamie, please.”

You must give away how desperate you are in your tone, because Jamie’s playful expression changes to concern.

“Are you alright?” he asks, “Did something happen?”

“No,” you shake your head aggressively, “I promise. I just want some alone time. I feel like my social battery just needs to recharge, you know?”

After a moment, Jamie still looks unsure, but nods. You think he’s going to say something else, before he’s standing up.

“I guess I’ll see you next week, then?”

You nod, and then throw him an encouraging smile, “Break a leg this weekend.”

Jamie’s face scrunches in confusion as he juts back, “What?”

You squint, “You’ve never heard that saying?” he shakes his head, “It means good luck.”

“Why the fuck would breaking a leg be good luck?”

You stare at him for a few seconds before frowning, “I don’t actually know.”

He shakes his head and continues to the doorway, giving you one last look as he wishes you a goodnight and disappears from view.

Sourly, you realize this was the first time he hasn’t offered to drive you home since you’ve met. Maybe that was for the best.

Jamie Tartt doesn’t yearn.

He’s liked plenty of women. He’s even loved a couple of them. But he doesn’t obsess over them.

You’re different, though. Apparently.

As soon as he left your office after finding out you weren’t coming to Amsterdam, he couldn’t stop thinking about you all night. It really wasn’t a big deal. It was two days. You weren’t even a couple. And yet, the idea of being apart for that long made his chest hurt. What the fuck was that about?

He’d been having confusing feelings a lot recently when it came to you. The two of you are closer than ever, bonding over little things between really, really great sex. At the same time, he felt like you were pulling away, and he couldn’t understand why. He thought you were having fun together. It really seemed like you enjoyed yourself, whether the two of you were just hanging out, or participating in your more extracurricular activities. But maybe you were getting tired of it. Maybe you were getting tired of him.

Shit. What did he do wrong?

And why does it bother him so much?

It was all your fault, really.

You with your kind heart and sweet compliments, which didn’t feel earned but he appreciated. You with your safe and comfortable embraces. You with your absolutely addictive laugh, that he’d jump through hoops to hear over and over again. You with your fucking eyes and the way you touch him during nights together, making him feel so wanted. You’ve gotten him accustomed to a certain lifestyle, one that he’s never experienced before, so now he wasn’t sure how to go back to before you started hooking up. Maybe that was what unnerved him. He was afraid if you stopped the benefits, the friendship would also stop, too. A little bit was about missing the sex, but mostly he’d miss you.

God, how you’ve ruined him.

Now here he was, surrounded by his teammates, in one of the greatest cities in the world, as they all mourned yet another loss. Despite how soul crushing these consecutive losses have been, Jamie finds himself more upset by the fact that he can’t see you tonight. With that thought propelling him, he jogs out of the locker room and finds an empty hallway to call you in. He doesn’t care if this makes him seem weird or desperate. He just wants to hear your voice.

“Hey, Jamie,” your soft voice answers after two rings. He clocks that you still sound a bit off, but it soothes him nonetheless, “I saw the game. I’m sorry.”

He manages to laugh, “Why are you watching football when you’re supposed to be relaxing?”

He smiles when he hears your own laugh through the phone, “I can multitask.”

There’s a beat of silence before you continue, “How’re you feeling? How’s the rest of the team?”

“Everyone’s miserable,” Jamie says point blankly.

“Wow, no hesitation there.”

“Yeah,” Jamie chuckles dryly, “Wish you were here, though.”

He listens intently as you sharply inhale. When you don’t respond after a few seconds, he calls out your name.

“Hey, Jamie, I’m in the middle of cooking dinner and if I don’t hurry, half of it is going to boil over. I’ll talk to you later, yeah? Tell the team hi for me.”

Before Jamie can even say goodbye, you’ve hung up. That doesn’t sit well with him. Not just because you ended the call so abruptly, but because he knew you really only cooked when you were anxious. Something was definitely up. Even if it had nothing to do with him, he finds himself wishing you’d at least want to confide in him.

Later that day, when the team has boarded the bus, the morale is criminally low. It’s so bad that it has Ted Lasso declaring that he’s revoking curfew and encouraging everyone to pull an all-nighter in Amsterdam. Suddenly, Jamie’s mood is boosted for the first time all week. A night of debauchery with his teammates was the perfect thing to get his mind off of their losing streak and you. Unfortunately, Roy has his own shit going on and decides that he needs to take it out on Jamie, by forcing him into an all night training session. Despite the disappointment, Jamie will take a distraction in any form at this point.

So, he plasters on a smile and forces Roy on a running tour of Amsterdam. By nightfall, he’s annoyed the grumpy coach into admitting, one, that he’s never seen a windmill and doesn’t believe they exist, and two, that he doesn’t know how to ride a bike.

Naturally this leads to Jamie teaching Roy how to do exactly that. After a series of attempts that are simultaneously humorous, frustrating, and endearing, Roy successfully manages to stay upright, and the two of them bike off in search of a windmill.

For some reason, Jamie finds it in himself to apologize to Roy for making fun of him earlier. He’s also surprising himself when he tells Roy about his childhood visits to Amsterdam. The first involves a suppressed memory of his father taking him to lose his virginity, and the second with his mother, that he actually looks back on fondly. He’s never told anyone about either of these trips - even you.

He supposes Roy could sense this, when he makes an admission of his own; that he’d been taking his anger out on Jamie because he’d found out Keeley has a new girlfriend. That’s all Roy says on the matter and Jamie doesn’t push him for more.

Not long after that, they finally make it to a windmill. Jamie genuinely smiles, taking it as a win when Roy appears mildly happy. If Jamie could tell his childhood self he’s staring at a windmill in Amsterdam with his hero, that kid would probably shit himself. Now Jamie’s just happy they get along at all.

Maybe it's because of the bond they seemed to forge that night, or maybe it's the sleep deprivation, but as they start biking back, Jamie finds himself confiding in Roy about something else.

“Hey, can I get your opinion on something?” Roy doesn’t say yes, but he also doesn’t say no, so Jamie continues, “I’ve been sleeping with this girl-”

Roy groans.

“I know, just hear me out. We’ve been hooking up for a while now, and it's just casual, which is great, but recently she’s been acting weird. I think she’s making up excuses not to see me and it bothers me that she’s not telling me what’s bothering her. But we’re not in a relationship, so why should I care? I mean, I do care. Like, if she’s upset I want to know so I can help fix it. But I care as a friend, ya know? I guess what I’m trying to figure out is how to ask her what’s been going on, without fucking up our situation and making her think I like her more than I do,” Jamie explains in a rush.

Roy discreetly rolls his eyes, “Well, it does sound like you fucking like her.”

“What?” Jamie almost veers off the road, “I do not!”

“Yeah, you definitely do.”

“No, we’re just friends who occasionally have sex,” Jamie states firmly.

“Alright, so if she told you she wanted to stop?”

Jamie hesitates, but eventually responds assuredly, “I’d respect her wishes.”

“And if she wanted to start seeing someone else?”

Jamie’s expression becomes pained.

Roy chuckles as he shakes his head, “I fucking told you.”

Jamie sighs, “Shit.”

“What?”

“I’m not supposed to…like her.” I promised myself. This was not the time for Jamie to spiral, but now his heart was racing. He knew he was too attached to you, but liking you? Romantically? And all it took was Roy fucking Kent to point out the obvious for it to sink in.

“Well, tough shit,” his coach scoffs, “You like her, so what? You think she doesn’t like you? She must if she’s been putting up with you for however long.”

“Gee, thanks,” Jamie rolls his eyes, “And I have no idea how she feels, but that’s not what freaks me out. Its if she does feel the same way, it’ll be real, and when I inevitably fuck it up, I…I don’t know what I’ll do. I’ve never met someone like her, and the last thing I want to do is mess things up like I always do.”

“So instead of the risk of potentially getting hurt down the line, you’d rather knowingly hurt yourself now by pretending like you don’t have feelings at all and hope they’ll go away?”

Jamie glances at Roy briefly before letting out a humorless laugh, “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

Roy nods ruefully, “Yeah. I know a thing or two about that.”

Jamie sits with Roy’s admission. He assumes it's in reference to his breakup with Keeley, and he’s seen how he’s handled that. Maybe he should tell you, and maybe you’d live happily ever after. But there was still a chance you didn’t have the same feelings, especially with how you were seemingly avoiding him. That didn’t really give him a vote of confidence. After a few moments, Jamie’s brought out of his thoughts when Roy surprises him by saying your name.

“It's her isn’t it,” Roy asks, “She’s the girl you’ve been seeing?”

Jamie narrows his eyes, wanting to deny it, but not seeing the point, “How’d you know?”

Roy shrugs, “You’ve just seemed…,” it nearly pains him to say, “Happier, since she’s been around.”

Jamie’s eyes soften, but then turns mischevious. He practically smirks despite the weight of this conversation, “You obsessed with me or something, coach?”

Roy grunts, “Shut the fuck up.”

“I have been, though,” Jamie admits, “Happier. Like I said, I’ve never met anyone like her. She’s so smart and funny, and so goddamn nice, despite some of the shit she’s been through. No matter how hard I try, I don’t think I’ll ever deserve her.”

Roy takes in Jamie’s words thoughtfully. “I don’t think you’re giving yourself enough credit.”

Jamie chances a glance at Roy, surprised by his words.

“You’re a good guy, Jamie. And she’d be lucky to have you.”

Jamie tries not to be touched by Roy’s compliment, but a small smile finds its way on his face. Not many people have said this about him - he’s not even sure he believes it himself. He doesn’t know how to respond to convey his appreciation, so he just softly says, “Thanks.”

Roy looks over to Jamie and gives him a meaningful nod. “But if you tell anyone I said any of this I’ll fucking deny it.”

Jamie manages a laugh. “Aye aye, coach.”

Despite his insecurities, Roy’s belief in him is almost enough encouragement to want to tell you everything and see where it goes. You had been putting up with him - to borrow Roy’s words. More than that, up until recently, he felt the two of you growing even closer, so there could be a chance it was because you were starting to develop feelings for him, too. He was inclined to believe it was all in his head, but maybe he should start looking at the glass half full instead of completely empty.

While he definitely wouldn’t be professing his feelings to you right away, he was allowing himself to feel something akin to hope.

Wow. Losing an exhibition match, bonding with Roy Kent, and denying but eventually accepting his feelings for you all in one night. When in Amsterdam.

The pair continue to bike down the street in comfortable silence. That is until Roy accidentally veers off the road into the woods.

“Fuck!”

Back in Richmond, you’re doing a horrible job of getting your mind off of Jamie.

You started your evening by watching their match, which definitely defeated half the purpose of not going with them to Amsterdam, but you used wanting to support the team as an excuse. You couldn’t keep your eyes off of Jamie, though, so by the time the game was ending, you were knee deep in making a whole-ass lasagna you definitely couldn’t eat by yourself. After their unfortunate loss, you sent Sam an apologetic text with a lot of emojis. What you weren’t expecting was Jamie to call you, and you felt like not answering would be rude. You thought you could handle a friendly conversation, but then he was saying something about missing you and you were panicking and hanging up before you could process what you were doing.

You knew your tactics of avoiding him wasn’t exactly a nice thing to do. You just were not a confrontational person, and even though Jamie would most likely be cool with, well, cooling things off, you didn’t know how to express that to him. Jamie didn’t seem like the type to be angry at you for just asking for what you wanted, or try to convince you to change your mind, like someone else you once knew, but past circumstances clouded your brain, making it more difficult to try.

So for now, you’d try to find the space to let any feelings go away on their own. Because that will definitely work.

After over-indulging in homemade Italian food, you try to get invested in some good old TV. You try watching something new, not having had time to binge watch as of late, but you couldn’t focus on the plot enough to get invested. So, you tried watching Grey’s Anatomy, per usual, but even the iconic Cristina Yang wasn’t enough to keep your mind off of Jamie. As a last ditch effort, you threw on a trashy reality show but of course that reminded you of Jamie.

Giving up on television altogether, you decide to Facetime your dads and catch up with them. Admittedly, you hadn’t had the chance to have a long conversation with them in a few weeks, only speaking to them briefly over text or quick calls between work and football matches. You were instantly comforted once their faces filled your phone screen, and you vowed never to go this long without speaking to them.

Dad and Pops take turns filling you in on their life in Kansas, from work woes to neighborhood gossip. They also tell you about going to Henry’s soccer games and how well he’s been doing. It warms your heart that he’s most likely taken up this sport in honor of his dad. They also inquire about how work has been going for you (”it’s still really great!”) and whether there’s anything else of note to share (”nope!”). You wonder if they can sense the nervous energy radiating off of you through the phone.

Then they ask you if you’ve been writing at all. For some reason this catches you off guard. It was as if you’ve never heard of the concept. When you first got to England, you’d try so hard to write during your off time. Rebecca has even encouraged you to do so when things were light at work. However, writer’s block was still plaguing you. And recently, all of your free time was taken up by team outings, dinners with Ted, and being with Jamie. But here you are, free from all of those things for the first time in weeks.

After talking to your dads for nearly an hour, ending with a promise to do this more often, you’re hanging up and running for your laptop. You plop down on the couch and pull up a blank word document. To no surprise, you stare at the blank page for five minutes when no ideas come to mind. Normally, this would segue into you opening Google News to see if any little piece of media struck inspiration. When you do this, the first article you see is about AFC Richmond facing another defeat.

You groan, closing the browser immediately. When you’re face to face with the empty page again, you aggressively smash your computer keyboard.

Fuck Jamie Tartt.

For some reason, typing the words out on the page made you feel a tiny bit better, so you keep going.

Fuck him and his stupidly attractive face and his dumb, endearing jokes. Fuck him and his ability to invade my every thought, and the way he somehow knows exactly what to say to make me feel better when I’m sad. Fuck him and his surprising thoughtfulness and his sense of humor that perfectly complements my own. Fuck him for being so good at fucking me, that he’s probably ruined me for anyone else. Fuck. Jamie. Tartt.

You stare at your stream of consciousness thoughtfully. It was like you were making a pro-con list where every con was just a pro you didn’t want to be true. These were all things that drove you nuts about Jamie - the way he became such a light in your life without you giving him permission to. He was supposed to be a safe choice because he was so unsafe. His reputation was bullshit. He wasn’t just someone you fooled around with until you got bored, or he did. He was someone you could see yourself being with forever without growing tired of him.

Okay, avoiding him definitely wasn’t enough while these intrusive thoughts were circling your brain.

You reread the words on your screen one last time, as your hand hovers over the backspace. Before you click it, you find yourself amused by your chaotic ramblings. You even find yourself thinking…this would be a very intriguing first line of a book.

It would take some fine tuning and obviously a name-change, but if you’d picked up a book and this was the opening sentence, you’d absolutely need to know more.

Running with this thought, you start tweaking your words, while you simultaneously try to envision a circumstance for this story outside of your own.

A friends with benefits storyline would be a little too on the nose, but enemies to lovers is always a good trope. Maybe after this first line, you could jump back in time, making readers wait until the book was halfway through to learn the context for this angry thought.

Suddenly, you’re taking all your ideas and running with them. You switch between writing paragraphs, to writing ideas, outlining scenes, and jotting down incoherent thoughts that you’re not sure fit, but could honestly be enough of a thought-starter for a whole other story. No matter how it all fits together, you’re pretty dead set on a romantic comedy angle. You wonder why you hadn’t had the idea for one before, considering it was one of your favorite genres as a consumer. It probably has nothing to do with the lack of romantic-comedy-energy from your last relationship. And certainly there’s no correlation to being able to write one now with the current situation you were in.

Before you know it, it's the middle of the night and you’ve been writing for hours. You’re not sure any of its good, but its something. The one thing you know, as your eyes begin to droop, is that you’re not going to write anything of substance while your energy is sufficiently drained.

You force yourself off the couch, managing to plug your computer in, before you crash on your bed. The next time your eyes open, its 9AM, and with barely seven hours of rest, you feel too wired to go back to sleep, anxious to start writing again. So, you put on a pot of coffee and fire up your laptop. You’re relieved you’d had enough of a brain at 3AM to save your document.

You spend the whole day writing, only stopping for snacks and bathroom breaks. You only become aware of what time it is when someone pounds on your door as the afternoon turns to evening. You hastily save your word doc before sliding over to the door. You should be surprised that Jamie occupies the other side, but you really weren’t. What surprised you was how much he looked like a zombie.

“Jamie?” you arch your eyebrow, as you move out of the way so he can cross the threshold, shutting the door in his wake, “Everything okay?”

“Guess what,” he says with a dopey smile on his face, “Ted let us stay up all night, so I taught Roy how to ride a bike and we saw a windmill.”

Part of you wants to laugh, but the rest of you is just really confused.

“Wait, you didn’t sleep last night?”

“Mhmm,” he nods once.

“God, you should be passed out at home right now. Why are you here?” Your eyes widen, “Don’t tell me you drove in this condition.”

“I ordered an Uber,” he explains sleepily as he takes your hand and tugs you to your bedroom.

Despite your plan to disengage in sexual activities - and all activities - with him, you don’t bother arguing knowing this wasn’t going anywhere while he was this tired. Still, you curse yourself for finding a sleep deprived Jamie very adorable.

You giggle as he plops down onto your bed face first. He manages to hold onto your hand as you stare down at him from beside the bed.

“You didn’t answer my question.” Jamie just mumbles incoherently into your mattress. Giving up entirely, you go to fold the comforter over him, having not bothered to make your bed this morning. “While you are welcome to nap here, I’m sure your fancy bed at home would be much more comfortable.”

As you begin to tuck him in, he turns over suddenly, and pulls you onto the bed beside him.

“Yeah, but you’re not there and I wanted to see you,” he mumbles tiredly, his eyes fluttering up and down slowly.

You allow yourself to bask in this moment, with your face a few inches from his. Sitting up slightly, you gently trace your fingers over his eyelids, coaxing him to sleep.

“Well, now that you’ve seen me, you can close your eyes and get some rest,” you whisper. His face nuzzles against your hand a little before he settles into your pillow.

He mumbles something else, but then you’re pretty sure he’s fully passed out.

Sighing, you push yourself up and out of the bed. Per usual, he doesn’t stir at the movement, nor when you shut the bedroom door as you head back to the living room.

Once you’re alone and back on the couch, you let out a long sigh and rub your face. He does not make it easy, does he?

Even as warmth spreads across your face, Jamie’s words about wanting to see you echoing in your head, an uneasy feeling settles in your stomach. If you really wanted to get rid of the feelings you had for Jamie - feelings that were rapidly increasing by the second - you couldn’t avoid him forever.

You were going to have to end your “relationship”.

Suddenly, you’ve lost the motivation to continue writing a romantic comedy for the rest of the night. It was fun while it lasted.

You’re not sure you mean your sudden ability to write again or something else.

A/N: well that’s no good! lol, this was the hardest chapter to do, i rewrote some of it several times, so please let me know what you think of it!

Taglist: @atabigail @boundtomyfate @sammysgirl1997 @lil-tracys @shephard17895 @alaspice @itsbarbraann @redpool @drmeghanjones @straightforwardly @alex-sulli @aiyaiy @artemismaximoff @roadtoself-love @theloud-yet-quietone @forcesofgrief @kirisimpster @geek-and-proud @grippleback-galaxy @lalla-04p @gabbycoady13 @royalestrellas @qardasngan @creationcitystreet-em @percysaidnever @emily-b @mrfitzsimmons @k-n-e @agentstarkid @legobatmans9thab @mrsprongs25 @escapismqueen @sokkigarden @for-fuck-sake-im-alive @dollfaceyourfear @dicgohargreeves @heyitz-julia @vampirodelascajas @grxcesmind @lizziel1410 @a-sweet-little-fangirl @scaramou @beardsplitter @gcidrvsh @ringpopdust @marveltg365 @optimisticsandwichgladiator it wouldn’t let me tag the last few of you, let me know if its something with your settings, otherwise i can keep trying in future updates! <3

#jamie tartt x reader #jamie tartt imagine #jamie tartt fanfiction #jamie tartt x f!reader #jamie tartt x female reader #ted lasso fanfiction #ted lasso fanfic #mine #distractions series

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esamastation · 7 months

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Shizuroth, part four.

Sephiroth's phone isn't a proper smartphone and has no internet, and he's being very brave about it.

Well, it has something. It is… kinda like a half-assed smartphone? Sorta. It's like that old flip phone his grandfather used to use - probably still does, if he's still alive, somewhere in another universe. It was more brick than a phone - no touchscreen, and the closest it got to any kind of smart features was running an email app, somehow. Sephiroth's phone is a bit like it. It has email - or just mail, apparently. It also has tutorials? Which is useful. Also online shopping? But no apps, no search function, no internet, no wikis, no websites, nothing. It doesn't seem to have photo or video options either - but apparently it keeps track of all his missions.

It's like somehow people invented most of everything that goes into a smartphone - but no one got around to inventing the internet, or anything like it. What a waste!

The tutorials are useful, admittedly, though they're more like manuals, really. Not like cultivation manuals, sadly, more like user manuals. "How to use your PHS" and "what key card opens what floor" and "missions, what are missions" and "materia, what is it and how does it work". There's dozens and dozens of tutorials on the phone, just like you might expect to find in a videogame that couldn't trust its users to remember how everything works.

The mission roster is, uh. It's definitely something. There's categories, subcategories, levels, and then under those there's info and completion status. And Sephiroth, apparently, does a lot of missions. Like. A lot. He kinda despairs at the idea of having to keep up with it, because it looks like Sephiroth is a workaholic. Though, thankfully, half of the missions are training, experiments in the labs, or experimental training. Still! Isn't he supposed to be the Big Bad? Why is he working so hard?!

The shops' menu on the phone, though very bare bones and lacking any pictures, has his heart leaping with joy - as does the adjacent menu detailing Sephiroth's wallet situation. Which is… very good. Like, Shen Qingqiu wasn't exactly short on change either, he was the second Peak Lord of the most powerful sect in the world - but comparing the Gil Sephiroth has to the price of stuff in the various shops listed on his phone…

Sephiroth has that fuck you money. Guess that's what you get from being a workaholic Big Bad, the strongest and scariest in the evil dystopian planet-sucking mega corporation! You get money. And lots of it.

… Which, along with the details of all the clothing stores on his phone, makes his wardrobe situation even sadder, doesn't it? He should've definitely been able to afford a coat that actually fit him.

Ultimately though, what he figures to be most useful is the mail. There's a lot of it, and it looks like mailing lists are all the rage these days. Because Sephiroth's barely got anything else in his inbox.

News mailing list, SOLDIER mailing list, Shinra mailing list - professor Hojo telling him to go to the labs - another news mailing list, Shinra business mailing list, Wutai News mailing list - Genesis telling him to meet him for a spar - another mailing list, mailing list, mailing list - urgent meeting with Director Lazard - and some more mailing lists.

There are not that many personal messages, honestly. A few requests for a spar, and that's about it. Is that all he does for fun? What is Sephiroth, Liu Qingge 2.0? All he does is work and spar! Just skimming through his schedule makes him feel exhausted.

At least thanks to the mailing lists - and phone's bare bones calendar app - he'd figured where he's at, story-wise. Pre-Crisis Core, pre-Genesis' whole thing, pre… just about everything he remembers from each game.

Wutai war is still going on. And, rather distressingly, Sephiroth has a lot of Wutai missions coming up.

That's… not ideal.

Resting the phone against his lips in thought like he once held a fan, he sighs and tries to think it through.

There's a squeak as the other SOLDIER steps out of the stall. Must've been the door hinges. "Sir," the SOLDIER says, carefully.

"Mn," he answers and tries to look as Sephiroth-like as he can while also projecting an aura of don't talk to me, I don't even know your name at the man. It works, because the man clearly doesn't want to talk to him.

It's very useful, having a villain halo.

The SOLDIER washes his hands like he can't wait to get away and then hesitates at the door. "Sir, I - there's someone -" the SOLDIER says, tentatively and then flounders at his slow blink. "Someone will be here soon."

With that said, the SOLDIER flees before he can think of a suitably Sephiroth-like answer.

Someone will be here soon? …Okay? Why?

Making a face, he looks around in confusion and notices that one of the bathroom lights is burned out.

Oh, someone will be here for the light? Right, of course, he's the scary Big Bad here, can't subject the scary Big Bad to a less than stellar environment. Heh, guess that's an upgrade of sorts!

He… really didn't want it.

It's all rather concerning, really. What is he actually supposed to do here? Go on missions, train, clad himself in barely fitting leather with a ridiculous amount of buckles, and go to war? Over building a life-sucking factory? By a vaguely western, very unsubtle Big Oil Allegory, at that. In what was a vaguely Chinese-coded land, too. The whole thing was very iffy, from what he remembers! He doesn't want to get involved!

And then what is he supposed to do, play out Sephiroth's life to its fiery, insane conclusion? Resurrect and then attempt to destroy the world?! Like all the good Big Bads of old! But he isn't even sure when that is supposed to happen! The timeline in these games is super vague!

At least with PIDW there was a very clear end goal, ah! It was awful and trying to survive had given him grey hairs, but there was a clear forward momentum and an end point! If he survived past it, then… then he won? Maybe?

He hadn't survived past it, though.

He'd died.

… Again.

Closing his eyes, he sighs against Sephiroth's phone, shaking his head. Depressing, depressing, it's so depressing! He'd really grown to like his life as Shen Qingqiu too! All his cute disciples, his books on Qing Jing Peak, his art works, all the things he'd got… all the things he'd done… the friends he'd made…

And Binghe…

Ah, his sweet, terrifying Black Lotus. As scary as Binghe had been towards the end, he's really sad he wouldn't be able to see Binghe grow into his own! Reading about the protagonist growing stronger and overcoming all obstacles had been his favourite part. And he'd rather been looking forward to watching it. Safely at a distance, mind you, disguised in another, unknown, body, under a new name and everything. Because if Binghe found out he survived…

Well.

Probably just as well. This is a new world and maybe, just maybe, he can now -

There's a sound that is an awful lot like an explosion, and he nearly drops his phone in shock as the restroom door is nearly blown off its hinges with the force it opens.

"What torment hath your soul suffered," espouses the runaway idol standing dramatically in the doorway, "to find the end of your journey here, of all places?"

In the immortal words of Airplane Shooting Towards The Sky.

W. T. F?

No System needed to gamify the world when the world is already a video game!

#Fanfiction #ffvii #svsss #Sephiroth #Shen Yuan #Shen Qingqiu

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teejaystumbles · 7 months

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For Sandtober #6, "golden", and the Monsterfucktober bingo square "undead", I present you something based on one of the books that left an impression on my teenage mind and now that is all I can think of when I get "bones" and "gold" in relation to one another -

Servant of the Bones AU

In Babylon, about 600 years BC, Hob, a young handsome shepherd, is forced to become the new statue of the god Marduk but through a secret ritual conducted by a witch does not die and is made into an undying spirit who has to serve whoever owns his bones. The witch botches up the ritual and dies, leaving Hob with his mind his own - even if he has to obey the bones’ current master, he is able to think for himself and over the centuries he outsmarts a lot of his crueler masters, leading to their demise and to the box being inscribed with more and more warnings not to summon what is inside.

First AU variant: In 2022, Dream Endlos [lol let’s give him the German name variant for once], a successful author of books and screenplays, buys an old mansion (Fawney Rig) which is full of old occult stuff from the previous owner. While he sorts through the stuff he comes to the conclusion that he’ll have to hire an expert to ascertain the value of a lot of objects. He trips over a box on his way out and it falls over and unlatches, revealing a glimmer of gold inside. Curious, Dream opens it and finds the golden bones of what seems to be a complete human skeleton. The box is inscribed with ancient warnings in almost every language from cuneiform to hieroglyphs to Greek and Latin. Dream is both horrified and fascinated.

He reverently places the bones back inside the box, carefully handles the skull and wonders about the person they belonged to. He goes to bed, his mind spinning with possible scenarios and stories concerning the bones, the box, the warnings. He lies awake for hours. Late at night he gets up again and goes back downstairs. He takes the box back up into his bedroom and sits before it. “Who were you?” he asks the box, and there is a quiet whisper of a man’s voice near his ear. “My name. Is Hob.”

Second AU variant (that I like almost better because I know how it would end):

Burgess gets his hands on the bones after he captures Dream. He uses Hob to try and get Dream to talk, in so far as that he sends him down to talk to Dream and learn his secrets, in the hopes it might work because Hob is a supernatural being. Hob is fascinated with Dream immediately and tells him that he should not talk to him so he won’t have to betray anything to Burgess. “You mustn’t tell me anything important, I cannot lie to my master. If he commands me to tell him what you said I’ll have to answer. But I can tell you about a lot of things, if you’re bored. You must be bored, right?”

Dream is in turn fascinated with Hob and his strange curse and after a while they talk about unimportant things, things they like and dislike, they tell each other stories. Hob tells Dream how he was made into what he is against his will. Dream aches with sympathy. Burgess is frustrated because he gets no results. Maybe he also tries to have Hob use force on Dream but luckily the magic circle and spells make it impossible for Hob to enter the sphere Dream is held in. Events happen like in episode 1, Alex inherits Hob’s bones but barely uses him to do anything because he’s almost more scared of Hob than he is of Dream. Hob talks to Paul more than he talks to Alex and he tries to subtly influence the man to let Dream go. It takes decades but eventually Paul is showing signs of having had enough. Hob warns Dream to be alert and begs him to please take his bones with him if he escapes. Events unfold like in canon and Dream breaks free. He leaves without Hob’s bones, too weak to search for them right away. He knows where they are but he can’t get them without reclaiming his power first.

Hob thinks Dream has left him to his fate and is full of sadness and despair. He returns to the bones, his master caught in an eternal waking nightmare. Paul takes the bones and calls on him to help Alex, but Hob can't help and so he ignores the pleas and doesn't even manifest. Paul is frustrated and puts the bones into a safe and out of his mind. When Dream has got the sand, helm and ruby back he goes back to Fawney Rig and searches for Hob. He finds his bones and takes them with him to the Dreaming, putting them into his own private rooms. Hob does not answer him and Dream pleads for forgiveness and begs Hob to come back to him. Only when he places a kiss on the forehead of the golden skull do the bones start to vibrate and come together and Hob is able to form himself a new body, with the help of the power of the Dreaming, a body that holds his bones and is free of the box so he will not be bound to any master ever again. :)

#technically the servant is a genie/spirit but I still count him as undead because of the bones I hope that's fine #sandtober2023 #monsterfucktoberbingo #dreamling #the sandman fanart #teejaystumbles #the sandman fanfiction #teejay writes

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dreamingofep · 29 days

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Sinned Awakening pt. 25 🩸

An AU Elvis fic

(Vampire!Elvis/ Vampire Austin! Elvis x reader)

Character/Fandom: Elvis - Elvis (2022)

Prompt: Getting promoted to be Elvis full time housekeeper, you realize the man holds secrets beyond beliet and your undeniable attraction makes you tear the unknown. [Fem!Reader]

TW: Cussing, tension, ANGST, smut, mentions of blood/gore!!!

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 5.4k

A/N: Hello everyone! Thanks for your patience with this one! I have the second half of this part in Elvis’ perspective to get a better grasp of what he was going through early on in the relationship. Especially after new revelations get brought up to reader…

I thought this second half blends in perfectly to part 8. I reread it and might insert this new part in between the first and second days of meeting each other. Or write more parts in his perspective I don’t know…🫣 But that’s how you can read it if you feel so inclined!

If you'd like to start from the beginning, start here or Ao3! hope you enjoy and message and comment what you think.

A reminder, this is Vampire!Elvis so there is going to be mentions of blood/gore from here on out. If that's not your thing, sorry but it's needed for the story.

The sound of the door slamming rang in your ears like a dog whistle. It was painful and made you want to collapse to your knees. Not only did the sound hurt, but your heart also hurt. You felt it down to your bones how much pain Elvis felt when you were telling him how you were questioning his morals.

You quickly open the front door again in hopes of stopping him. He was getting on his motorcycle and putting the keys in the ignition. A couple of the guys were standing around with worried looks on their faces, unsure of where he was going. They look up to you for guidance, hoping you had an idea of what he was doing. You start to run to him and in a blink of an eye you were right in front of him. You were shocked to find that you were this fast. You grab onto Elvis’ wrist once more, hoping he will listen.

“Elvis please, tell me where you’re going,” you beg. He had his sunglasses on, shielding you from the cold stare he had.

“Please, let go of me, I have to go.” You do as he says and let go of his arm. He starts the bike and revs the engine, making you jump at the sound. He pulls the throttle and speeds down the driveway. The front gates open and you watch as Elvis leaves your view, the breath getting sucked from your lungs.

The guys stand there motionless, not knowing what to do or say to you. You feel their eyes judging you, waiting for you to say something.

“Would you stop staring at me,” you snap at them. They all advert their eyes somewhere else, not wanting to upset you more.

There was this pit in your stomach that was filled with emptiness and despair. You did feel horrible for fighting with Elvis. The few times you two got into arguments, it felt awful, and didn’t like seeing him so upset. But this fight was different, you were married now, bonded vampires that were supposed to love each other til the end of time. You’ve barely been awake for twenty-four hours and managed to piss off your husband so bad he’s running away from you.

Great.

You step closer to Jerry and sigh.

“How much did you guys hear?” You ask. He pauses, unsure how to answer you without pissing you off more.

“We heard enough…” he says softly. You wince, not liking that you had an audience for your fight.

“Was it that bad?” You ask in a hushed tone.

He doesn’t look at you, he just keeps looking forward and nervously bites the inside of his cheek.

“Well… it was rough, let’s just say that much,” he responds.

You grumble at the confession. It didn’t take much for you to feel bad about the whole thing but hearing from another person is tough to handle.

“Fuck,” you mutter, turning to go back inside the house. You go to sit on the couch and put your face in your hands. You felt like you were on the brink of having an emotional breakdown. Everything felt cold and barren here without Elvis.

The front door opens again and you feel Jerry sit next to you. You don’t want to look at him, knowing you’re going to instantly cry. You both sit there in silence, not sure exactly what to say.

“You weren’t wrong though,” he says gently. You take a deep breath and look over at him.

“It wasn't easy to hear, but he needed to understand how you felt,” he continues.

“Yeah, I know,” you mumble.

“But he wasn’t wrong either.” He says low.

You shoot him a look of surprise and he looks away out of fear.

“I get it, I know he’s completely different from when I first met him. But he wasn’t listening to me at all! Wasn’t trying to meet in the middle.” You say frustrated.

He nods his head, “I get why that’s frustrating. Elvis is stubborn as you know, he loves having it his way,” he snickers, “but I think you doubt how much he loves you.” He says truthfully. You have to pinch your hand to keep yourself from blowing up on him.

“I know he loves me,” you growl at him.

“I’m sorry, y/n, I really don’t think you do,” he says, trying to get you to listen.

“Are you kidding me right now? Of course I know my own husband loves me!” You hiss at him.

“Y/n just hear me out, okay? Did he tell you how much he wanted you around when he first met you?”

You take a second to regroup yourself and you reposition yourself on the couch to look at him more head-on.

“I don’t know what you mean… he told me how much he wanted me after tasting my blood for the first time, is that what you mean?” You ask a little confused.

“No before that. He laid his eyes on you and thought you were the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. You walked in that room and completely changed his life,” he explains.

Hearing that made your heart soar. You didn’t know that he felt like that so early on.

“I didn’t know that… when did he tell you this?” You squeak out.

“Well, after your first day and the incident,” he puts lightly, “he came back and he looked different, like he thought about his whole life differently. I asked him what was wrong and he wouldn’t answer me right away, he was too deep in thought. Then he looked at me and his eyes were the clearest I’ve ever seen. He told me he’s never felt like that before… that he thought he loved you.”

“I thought he was absolutely crazy for saying sucha thing. He had just met you. But I didn’t say a word, knowing how much it would piss him off if I questioned his feelings for you… I know now that he was absolutely right. I’m the one that feels crazy for questioning it.” He says embarrassed.

More tears rolled down your cheeks, feeling overwhelmed by it all. You hate that you argued over something so petty with him. You felt so blind that you didn’t see or even questioned how much Elvis loved you. Your love ran deep from the second you walked into that room. Your bond tied you to each other instantly and he knew it, he was just scared you didn’t feel the same.

You wipe some of your tears and look back at Jerry.

“I’m an idiot… I always hurt him and question his feelings for me. I’ve been so blind,” you weep into your hands.

“No that’s not true. You were human, your senses don’t work like they do now. It wasn’t as obvious for you as it was for him. Don’t be too hard on yourself y/n,” he tries to explain. No amount of reassurance could make you feel better about this. You needed to make this right with him.

“I knew he felt strongly for me early on, I just had no idea how much… God, I need to apologize to him,” you cry.

“It’s going to be okay, you both just need some space to think clearly,” he says.

“He didn’t tell you guys where he was going? Not even a clue?” You push.

Jerry shakes his head and looks at you sorrowfully.

“No, I’m sorry. He just told us to go get his bike. He was pretty upset and would have probably bitten our heads off if we kept him waiting,” he says stiffly.

You couldn’t help but panic a little. No one knew where he was going or when he was coming back. Jerry sees how upset you are and doesn’t exactly know what to say.

“He might be out there looking for someone…” he says gently. You don’t understand what he’s talking about, Elvis didn’t mention anything like this to you.

“Who exactly?” You ask.

“Ever since he bit you and you didn’t exactly change right away, he was a nervous wreck. He had no idea what had happened or if you were going to wake up. He thought he had almost killed you,” he says regretfully.

“He kicked us all out of the hotel and told us to go back home and start looking for answers. Any sort of sign that you’d be okay or any lore that might explain what’s happening to you. He also didn’t want us around you at all. He was already possessive around you enough when you were human but he wouldn’t let us near the bedroom. I’ve never seen him so scared and rattled.” He sighs.

Your heart cries for Elvis, you wish you could have comforted him in some way.

“So you guys came back here? Did you find any answers?” You ask intrigued.

“No, not exactly… we were trying to find older vampires that may have heard about this kind of thing. Or better yet, we hoped to find another Chosen pair.”

You feel your heart flutter at the thought. It would be incredible to find other Chosen vampires and have them explain to you both what it’s like. Explain to you your abilities and how they work.

You grab Jerry’s wrist in excitement and have his full attention on you.

“Well, did you find any?!” You ask excitedly.

He looks down at your hand around his wrist and tries to move.

“Umm, y/n, you’re hurting me,” he grunts. You instantly let go of him and feel bad.

“Shit I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to,” you say panicked.

“No, it’s okay. Elvis might kill me that I have your scent on me but it’s fine, I’ll live,” he teases, rubbing his red wrist.

“Stop don’t joke like that!” You laugh, “I won’t let him do anything to you don’t worry. But seriously, what happened? Did you find anyone?” You continue.

“The thing about old vampires, is they don’t like to be seen. They either don’t like the modern world or they’re too stubborn to leave their house. A lot like how Elvis was in Vegas. He wouldn’t ever leave before you came around. He was too afraid he’d go on a feeding spree,” he jokes. It didn’t feel like a joke to you though, he was unpredictable over there, and he might have done just that.

He watches how that thought makes you nervous and tries to distract you by talking about something else.

“So to answer your question, no, we haven’t found anyone that can give us answers. I’m sorry y/n. I wish we could help you guys figure this all out and understand what happened to you, but we have no idea. I have a feeling that’s where Elvis went. He’s looking for answers. I’m sure he wants to know what you guys need as far as blood. But most importantly, he needs to know what happened to you. Why you didn’t wake up after he bit you,” he presses.

You both sit there in silence for a while, unsure of what to say next. You had no answers and without Elvis here, it didn’t seem like you were going to get any.

Jerry stands up and starts to walk away, “I’ll leave you alone… you’ve had a busy first day as a vampire,” he says low.

Shit, he’s right, you’ve barely been up for a day and so much has happened and you’ve learned so much.

You continue to sit there, unsure of what to do. You glance at the clock and it reads 2:30 am. It dawns on you that you weren’t tired. You were wide awake and had no idea what to do to occupy your time now.

You felt your head swirl with a million thoughts. There was so much you wanted to say to Elvis. You needed to apologize for how blind you’ve been and how regretful you are for saying those awful things. He changed and you couldn’t hold what he did in the past over him. You can’t imagine how scary it was for him to bite you and watch you lay there motionless for days yet again.

You didn’t want to be seen by anyone and wanted to hide from everyone after they heard your fight with Elvis. Making your way up the stairs, you open the door to the bedroom and close it softly. You let out a deep sigh when you turn around and see the bedroom dark and barren.

This wasn’t how you pictured yourself on your first day as a vampire. You wanted everything to be alright and have him by your side. You walk over to the bed and sit on the corner of it. It felt cold and uninviting. All you could see was you two lying in the middle of the bed holding each other, whispering tender words to each other. But that was a cruel daydream that wasn’t going to be happening any time soon.

The First Day with You, After the Incident

Elvis silently curses at himself, ticked off he treated you like such an asshole. If he had some control, maybe he could have had a normal conversation with you and not scared you off so easily. Your scent still swirled in his head and made his mouth continue to water. He had a hard choice to make. Either follow you home or go back upstairs and try to forget how you tasted. He knew both options were going to be torture to him and he didn’t like either option.

Sulking back upstairs from the parking garage, all he could think of was you. How you looked, how you said his name, how your blood spilled down his arm like sweet honey. The closer he gets to the penthouse, the more fragrant your scent becomes. He starts to walk through the hallway and he looks at his men standing there with their red eyes glowing. Hungry.

It pissed Elvis off seeing them lusting after your blood. It didn’t make sense why he felt so strongly about shielding you from them but he hated that they were starving to have a taste of you. He pins one of them to the wall and quickly gets in their face.

“You better not be thinkin’ of feeding off her,” he seethes, “you won’t lay a finger on her you understand,” he barks at him. He quickly nods his head and looks away from Elvis. Elvis gives him another shove for good measure and quickly goes into the suite, slamming the door harshly.

He lets out a sigh when he’s once again wrapped in your essence. How could one human be so luring to him? He didn’t understand what made you so different from all the rest. Never had he experienced the immediate pull to a human quite like you. Sure, most people’s scents drew him closer to them as he wanted to feed from them, but you were so much different. Just the way your heart sounded to him was the most captivating sound he’d heard in a long time. The way it fluttered and faltered when he talked to you, he wanted to talk to you for hours to just get to hear it beat for him.

He goes to sit on the piano bench and regains some focus. But it was no use, all he wanted was you. Flashing images of your captivating eyes make him feel like a weak puddle. Oh, how he wished he could stare into your eyes longer. See what’s underneath those oceanic pools and swim in them. He huffs quietly, frustrated he could feel like this in a matter of minutes for you. He wanted you back here now, but you were much too frazzled to be around him.

A knock on the door shakes him from his daydream and looks up to see who it is.

“Yeah?!” He yells.

The door cracks open and Jerry peeks his head in.

“Are you okay-,” he starts to ask but the aroma of your blood is almost too much for him. He holds his breath as he waits for Elvis to answer.

“No, not really,” Elvis grumbles.

“Is there something we can do, or?” He asks carefully, knowing Elvis is not in the best of moods.

Elvis nervously wipes his palms on the tops of his thighs. He doesn’t exactly know what to say or try to explain how he feels.

“I don’t know… I don’t know what to do man. That woman… I can’t stop thinkin’ about her,” he admits.

“Are you sure you want her around after today?” He says carefully. Elvis glares daggers at him and that one look is all Jerry needs to shut up quickly.

Elvis stands up and straightens out his shirt, “she’ll be back up here tomorrow, you better call her,” he instructs. He goes to the window and looks out at the city below him, the streets crawling with life. He wonders where you live if you live close or further out of town. It would probably be easy to find where you live, your scent is something he could never forget and could easily find you. But not tonight, his mind was too all over the place to be so close to you again.

He turns back around and takes a deep breath in before speaking.

“I don’t know how but… I’m totally captivated by her. I don’t understand why I feel like this. One second I wanted to suck her dry and the next I just wanted to…” he pauses, searching for the right words, but he knew the exact one he felt, “love her. I just want to love her. She’s so perfect and beautiful, I love her,” he proclaims.

Jerry remains quiet, not wanting to tick him off more by his own personal feelings about the matter. Elvis tries to rationalize that he might feel this way because of tasting your blood but he’s never felt like this for any human. No one’s come close to the feelings he has for you. It scared him a little to be quite frank.

He needed to calm down and think rationally, a lot happened and he couldn’t just jump to the conclusion that he loved you the second he saw you. Those kinds of things don’t happen in real life. Those are things that happen in fairytales and his life was no fairytale.

Or could it turn into one with you in it?

Stop, you idiot, that’s not happening, he scolds himself.

Elvis goes to sit down on the sofa and contemplates what exactly he should do til you arrive tomorrow. It felt like such a long time to him until he was going to see your face again. Jerry doesn’t exactly know what to say and starts to leave the room. Before he closes the door, he turns back around to speak, “Forgive me, but were you still… hungry? There’s someone downstairs that we can have up here for you,” he informs Elvis.

Elvis sighs and nods his head. Maybe he just needed a distraction, something to take his mind off of you.

“Sure, maybe I’m too starved to think clearly. Send her up whenever,” Elvis says flatly. He goes to change his clothes to get your scent off of him. But who was he kidding, that’s not happening, he only wanted more. He changes anyway into a new button-up shirt and slacks and looks over himself in the mirror. His eyes were extra vibrant and not so dull looking. It surprised him after having so little of your blood, it made him feel dramatically better.

He smooths the hair on the side of his head and tries to regroup himself.

She’s just a girl… that’s all.

Don’t be an idiot and fall head-first in love with her.

You’re just too starved, anyone would taste good to you, he thinks.

Lies, all lies.

An hour later, there’s a soft knock at the door. Elvis takes a deep breath and goes to answer the door. A short, cute brunette stands in front of him, ogling him the second she sees his face.

He smiles at her, finding her reaction to him cute. She was cute. Not beautiful like you but still attractive.

“Hi, darlin’,” he says smoothly. He hears her heart gallop away in her chest and he does like the sound of it. “Would you like to come in?” He asks her.

“Oh, yes,” she says softly. Elvis opens the door and steps aside so she can step inside. He leads her to the sofa and sits next to her.

“What’s your name sweetheart?” He asks, brushing her hair off her shoulders and exposing her neck to him more. She takes a sharp breath in before speaking, nerves rushing through her.

“Amy. I saw your show last night. You were amazing,” she gushes. He gives a small smile, grabbing her small, delicate hand in his.

“Thank you darlin’. I’m so glad you enjoyed it. Did you have a favorite part?” He asks coyly. She giggles softly and hides her face from him.

“Oh all of it, but,” she blushes and stops when she feels him rubbing circles on the back of her hand. Her heart flutters more and he likes it, he wants to hear it get louder.

“But what darlin’?” Elvis asks her.

She takes a deep breath before speaking and looks at his hand on hers.

“But I didn’t get a kiss when you walked through the crowd. You walked right by me,” she says bluntly.

“Oh well I can fix that for you,” he coos.

Her heart hammers away in his ears as she nods her head and he leans in for the kiss. Her lips were soft and she sighed when she felt him kiss her. He didn’t necessarily hate it, it was nice to kiss someone who loved him already. He gives her another kiss as she wraps her arms around his neck. Her body screamed for him and the heat that came off of her was palpable. He put a hand on the back of her neck, pulling her in more and she loved it. He didn’t feel the same though, he just wanted to bite her, make her forget about that part of the evening, and get her to leave. Elvis pulls away from her and she’s left breathless.

“Was that okay? Hope I didn’t disappoint you,” he says slyly. She looks up at him with big needy eyes, clutching onto his shirt tightly.

“Oh it was perfect, thank you,” she blushes. “Could I have another?” She asks.

“Sure honey. Did you want to stay here or go in the bedroom?” He says low. Her heart skips a beat, just like he thought it would.

“Oh, we could go to the bedroom,” she whispers.

Elvis gets up and leads her to the bedroom, closing the door softly behind him. She sits on the edge of the bed, waiting expectantly for him. He steps in front of her, placing his hands on the tops of her thighs and rubbing softly there. He can feel the heat radiating off her body and the warmth of her core begging for him.

“Elvis?” She asks shyly. He looks over her, watching how the pulse in her neck rises.

Bite right there, his mind screams at him.

“What is it sweetheart,” he hums, tracing the side of her neck softly with the back of his finger.

“Touch me,” she whimpers. He places a kiss on her cheek and slowly raises her dress higher, exposing her naked core to him. He’s a little shocked, not expecting her to be so blunt.

“You are quite a bad girl aren’t ya?” He teases.

“I don’t know what you mean,” she retorts, opening her legs more for him to get closer to her. He hears her heartbeat rises quickly and all he can do is get closer to her neck, wanting to take a big bite there. The scent of her blood smelled appetizing and he placed kisses in the crook of her neck. She moans when she feels his lips on her.

An image of you flashes in his mind the more he nips and teases this girl.

Oh fuck.

Those beautiful eyes of yours take over his thoughts and how pretty they would look if they were the ones looking up at him right now. Damn, he wanted you here, he knew this girl was just a distraction but it wasn’t working. He wanted to taste you again, see what it would be like to taste your blood fresh from your neck. He groans at the idea and keeps nipping at the girl’s neck.

She starts getting restless as Elvis is so laser-focused on her neck.

“Elvis please,” she begs.

“Fuck, y/n,” he growls.

She freezes, “that’s not my name,” she grumbles.

“Sorry, give me a second honey,” he grumbles, trying to refocus on her scent and not yours.

She pulls him closer and rubs his soft length, trying to tease him. She’s a little surprised he’s not physically aroused as she pulls her neck away from him.

“Are you okay? Do you want me?” She asks slightly annoyed.

No, I don’t, he thinks flatly.

I want y/n. I want her all to myself and feed on that beautiful, beckoning body of hers…

Fuck, stop! You can’t have her! She’s too innocent to ruin her like that, he thinks. Just feed off of this girl and get over y/n.

He looks back at Amy and gives her a cute smile.

“Of course I do, I just wanna tease you a little more,” he coos, giving her a soft kiss on the lips. She smiles at that thought and goes back to touching him. He tries to get himself to focus on how she feels in his hands. Her skin was soft and supple around her hips. She liked it when he squeezed her tighter and started to nip at her neck. He feels her hands go to unbutton his pants and he grunts when he feels her hand wrap around his length.

Another image of your hand flashes in his head and his hips involuntarily buck into her hand.

“Fuck,” he groans.

Jesus, focus. Focus on anything but y/n jerking your cock in her hand, he thinks frustratedly.

It doesn’t work. All he wants is you.

She groans when she watches him get hard in her hand. His mind keeps going back to you time and time again. Wishing you were the one making him hard and wanting more. It’s terrible, he shouldn’t be thinking like this but you’ve got a hold on him it seems. All he can do is try to focus on her rising heartbeat and the way he can smell her blood coursing through her veins. He could feel his eyes start to shift, his blood lust overtaking his coherent thoughts. He lays her back on the bed, making sure she can’t see his changing eyes. He teases her entrance, rubbing his tip through her folds. She moans loudly, clutching onto his arms tightly. He quickly goes back to nipping her neck, feeling his fangs start to descend.

Bite her, now.

He grunts quietly and slides in a few inches of his cock inside her. She groans louder and squirms underneath him.

“Fuck Elvis. You feel so damn good,” she whimpers.

“Mhmm baby,” he grumbles, sucking her neck, getting that spot ready to sink his teeth into.

He swivels his hips into her more as he keeps his eyes closed, trying to not scare her by the state of his eyes. But this is an awful idea, all he sees is your face and your pleading eyes.

“Fuck, y/n,” Elvis grunts.

Oh God, this isn’t good. He can’t get you off his mind to save his life.

“What?” She asks confused.

“Oh baby nothing,” he coos, but extremely frustrated at himself.

He can’t hold on anymore and sinks his teeth into her neck. She lets out a loud scream, the pain of his fangs branding into her neck. Elvis starts to suck the blood out of her greedily, swallowing mouthfuls and ready to feel his energy start to rise. But this was different, he didn’t feel that much better than before. In fact, he didn’t want to feed anymore because all he could do was compare how you tasted to her.

A little panic sets in.

Oh God, what is happening to me? How can I crave one little human’s blood this much that it ruins all others for me? I just met her, she means nothing to me…

He carefully takes his fangs out of her and tries to get his appearance back to a normal human state. It was difficult at first, the smell of you lingered in his head and his imagination was running wild which did not help at all. Once he regained focus and control of his fangs to disappear, he looked back at Amy, mortified with what she had seen.

“What did you-,” she starts to say mortified but Elvis cuts her off, knowing he needs to get her to forget that part.

“Nothing honey. I didn’t bite you, you didn’t feel any pain, you won’t remember that part,” he compels. She takes a sharp breath and he watches as the memory fades from her eyes.

He spreads her legs wider, thrusting in and out of her faster and making her feel a wave of intense pleasure. She moans loudly, her eyes rolling in the back of her head.

“That’s right baby, take my cock like that. Makes you feel so good hmm?” He asks. She gasps for air, writhing underneath him.

“Yes, Elvis, oh my god,” she groans.

He was still too frazzled that he didn’t like feeding tonight. He’s never felt like this since he was always so hungry. He couldn’t fuck this girl anymore, he couldn’t care to keep up this charade.

He glides his hand down her body and finds her swollen bud. He rubs it in concentrated circles and it makes her buck her hips off the bed.

“I want you to come for me,” he tells her, edging her closer and closer to release. It doesn’t take long until she’s screaming his name and her walls are squeezing around his cock. It wasn’t anything mind-blowing to Elvis, his mind was on you and nothing else. He didn’t enjoy sex the same as humans. There was a time when he could enjoy it but tonight was not the night. He was done with entertaining this girl and just wanted some peace and quiet to figure out what was going on with him.

He pulled out of her gently, pulling down her dress and bending down to pull up his own pants. She sits up a little dazed and confused when she watches him stuff his hard cock back into his pants.

“Did you not like it?” She asks a little hurt.

He goes to place a soft kiss on her cheek and smiles when he looks back at her. Convincing as ever.

“Of course I did. I loved every second of it,” he coos.

Fucking liar.

She believed him and grinned sweetly at him.

“Oh good I’m glad. I’m here for a few more days if you ever want to spend some more time together,” she says flirtatiously.

I’d rather never see you again, he thinks.

“That would be wonderful darlin’,” he says with a smile. “Thank you for stopping by. I do need to get ready for my show now,” he says gently. She was understanding and started to get up off the bed.

Elvis leads her out to the front door and gives her one last kiss before she leaves, smiling sweetly. Once she turns her back, his smile fades and he closes the door.

He doesn’t know whether to panic or not over this whole situation. How could he have had so little of your blood and yet he was so fulfilled? Why couldn't he compel you either? Was he that weak?

It was terrifying for him in a way. All blood was the same to him, not one was better than the next. As long as it came from someone’s warm neck, he was fine. But now, you’ve changed everything. It scared him, but he knew he wouldn’t be the same from this point forward.

•

Tagging: @powerotelvis @burninlovebutler

@neptuneismysister @velvetelvis @ccab @presleyenterprise @theresalwaysep

@prompted-wordsmith @sillybookmarks @dkayfixates @ellie-24 @rktismylife-blog

@myradiaz @tacozebra051

@thatbanditqueen

@18|kpeters@flwrs4aust @emma181873

@austinswhitewolf@eliseinmemphis

@everythingelvispresley @chasingwildflowers @idontwanttoputanything @ohjustpeachy

@elvisalltheway101 @austinsmutler @kingdomforapony.

@generoustreemystic@claire-elvisgirl

@ashtag6887 @burnthheparaphilia @richardslady121

@jaqueline19997

@returntopresley. @iloveelvis @rjmartin11 @that-hotdog @louisejoy86 @misspresley @cattcb @annapresley8

@arrolyn1114 @raginginkedslut @epthedream69

@mh777ep1938 @50sexyshadesfashionista

@oldhOllywOod @hooked-on-elvis @livelovedilfs @sloppiest-of-jos

#elvis presley #elvis presley fanfiction #elvis fic #elvis smut #elvis imagine #elvis presely smut #70s elvis #vampire Elvis #elvis x reader #elvis x you #elvis x y/n #elvis fans #elvis fanfiction

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weirdbrothers · 2 months

Text

Stranger Things Fic Rec

Let me get one thing out of the way: absolutely nobody asked for this. But I love these pairings and stories so much I had to share it with you all. This is heavy on Steve/Billy with some Steve/Eddie sprinkled in.

If you've never read Stranger Things fic, or when you saw this post thought "oh yeah, that 80s kid monster show" I encourage you to give these a try! You don't have to know much about the show besides the bare bones of the plot. (And my ask box is always open for Qs!) If you like angsty teenage boys who are in denial about their feelings and hate their hometown, read on.

Now, on to the porn and depravity!

if i stare too long by @brawlite & @toast-ranger-to-a-stranger | Steve/Eddie/Billy

After the end of the world, Billy Hargrove is a mess. But at least he has company.

Notes: Literally one of my favorite fics of all time, I will never shut up about it. Gay threesomes. Angst. A sweltering midwestern summer. Homoerotic undertones that builds to filthy gay porn. The vibes are all there.

Pressure by Yellow_Blue_Books | Steve/Eddie

"You never did tell me your name," he called at Munson's back. The older man was already in the trees when he turned back around and stated his name, eyes bright and grin wide. Steve never heard it; he couldn't read his lips from so far a distance between them. So instead, he watched Munson walk away; the teen, now wide awake, went to sit on the hood of his car to wait for Hopper to show. On that crisp, cold January night in 1985 - Steve Harrington heard the sound of Eddie Munson's voice for the first and last time. He never even knew his name.

Notes: The only WIP on this rec list, and totally worth the wait. Great characterization. So many little tidbits of information that have me squealing with joy. But also dark and grounded in reality.

chokechain by @brawlite | Steve/Billy (and Tommy is there)

Tommy H. invites Billy to a party at Steve's house. Billy expected hot chicks and booze, but when he shows up, there's only the latter. Steve and Tommy teach Billy that in Hawkins, sometimes you just gotta make do.

Notes: When I think of this fic I literally start sweating its so sexy. The fic that got me hooked on Steve/Billy and gay Steve in general. Its so subtle and gritty and grimy and hot. And Tommy is egging everyone on, yet oblivious, just how I like him.

so good at being in trouble, so bad at being in love by @the-copperkid Steve/Billy

Steve's sophomore year, Billy showed up.

Notes: A fandom classic. The perfect example of Steve/Billy getting together in world, and dealing with their feelings (+ porn, because I'm me and I need porn in all my fic).

We'll Go Down in History by @eternalgoldfish | Billy/Steve

Hawkins High takes a field trip to Baltimore to see historical sites and Steve would rather jump out his hotel window.

Notes: So much teenage angst and tomfoolery in this one! A little more lighthearted than others on the list. Gets to that theme in ST that I love: the idle hands of teenage boys are the devil's playthings.

Dom 4 Hire by @lazybakerart

Steve is naked, on his hands and knees, in the apartment he shares with his high school sweetheart for a man he only just met in person five minutes ago.

Notes: From the second I saw Steve Harrington on screen I knew that boy was a sub dying for someone to call him a good boy. And Billy is just the dom for the job. My only complaint is that I wish this was longer!

Maybe we're something uncool by desert_dino | Steve/Billy

It’s only noon; Billy knows neither of them have work that evening, and their shitty gen-ed biology lab was cancelled. They’ve only been hanging out for an hour, and maybe Billy isn’t quite done fucking around with Harrington yet. Maybe he’ll indulge him.

Notes: Cocky Billy is what the world needs! Great banter and dialogue. Just a snapshot of what I imagine their afternoons would look like, and the teens of Hawkins would be like "why the fuck are they always hanging out?" totally oblivious.

slipping through by sightetsound | Steve/Billy

It was the weed, and the pilfered whiskey from Steve’s daddy dearest they passed back and forth. It was actually how Steve’s eyes caught the moonlight. How his mouth moved when he spoke, and how it curved on a grin Billy would call relaxed when they were alone. Admitting as much felt too much like giving ground, and so it was the weed and whiskey.

Notes: Really bittersweet, heartfelt, and sincere. A different kind of pace for this pairing.

You Get Too Close by @trashcangimmick | Steve/Billy

Steve sits at the back of the bus on the way to a basketball match in Gary. Billy Hargrove sits right across from him.

Notes: Be for real- when we saw that basketball and shower scene we were all hoping it would go in the direction of this fic. Gives me the vibe of an 80s porno in the best way.

Reflecting on the Longest Wavelength by @trashcangimmick | Billy/Hopper

Billy’s heat hits early. Jim Hopper happens to find him before anyone else does.

Notes: This pairing is a little rouge, I don't see it often and its hard to pin down for me past all the basic tropes. I really like the A/B/O world-building here and find myself returning to it.

#stranger things #stranger things fic rec #harringrove #steddie #fic rec

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swordcreature · 5 months

Note

How do you think our tiefling boys would react to our world if they somehow ended up here?

i always find these so cute, but in my head i'm thinking "they would be terrified and ready to stab someone because they are in a strange world where they can't understand anyone" lol

so to make things easier and cuter let's pretend that

1. there are no language barriers

2. no one is trying to kill them/no one's freaking out because they look like devils

3. they're somewhat aware enough of what's happening to not be scared shitless or severely confused

4. they know they're going back home at some point (i would be acting SO different if i thought i was gonna live in a different world forever vs just visiting lmao)

ty for the request you're the best!

Dammon, Rolan, & Zevlor - A Part of Our World

How the tiefling boys react to coming to our world

Dammon:

He’s amazed by the advancements we’ve made, slack-jawed at how we’ve managed to bend metal to form buildings that climb so high he can’t see the top, at how we’ve made metal fly without so much as a single spell, at how we’re able to make metal into machines so big they can move the earth itself.

It’s overwhelming at first and he has so many questions. How does this work? What type of metal is that? What does this do? It never stops.

But every answer is met with true awe. Dammon loves smithing, loves infernal machinery, and he’s been suddenly transported to a world built around his craft, of course he is inspired.

He’s the most open-minded of the tieflings when it comes to a new experience. And just like the Hells, even though this place is foreign, unfamiliar, frightening, he’s eager to learn something from it.

Dammon takes notes on everything he possibly can, sketching out little pictures of the world around him to bring back home.

I could see him being a bit of a terror just because he breaks everything around him trying to figure out how it works, what makes it tick, so to speak. I mean, how could he truly understand the inner workings of, say, a car without taking it apart piece by piece until he has it down to its bare bones.

Overall, I think he comes back home with so many good stories to tell of all the fantastical things he’s seen, all of the new ideas he has, and a renewed purpose in his work.

Rolan:

Rolan absolutely hates our world. It’s just not made for a guy like him.

I mean, first off: no magic. His life revolves around magic, it’s an integral part of him. Without it he feels empty and strange, so this world feels very wrong to him. Imagine being connected to the Weave for years and then suddenly having it stripped away. Completely gone. I would think it would feel disorienting at best.

He finds some interest in speaking to people of this world who practice magic, but it is so entirely different than his own that they're practically talking about two different things. He expected a more tangible magic like the Weave and is disappointed when he learns it’s so vastly incomparable.

Second: the people. There are so many people here. Pretty much anywhere he goes, the population would be bigger and denser than anything he’s used to. And it’s not like he’s a people person. Not to mention the way humans tend to treat outsiders.

Despite his absolute discomfort in our world, Rolan is determined to write down everything he can of his experience. Not many mortals from his world get to experience traveling the universes, so cataloging his journey is a must.

He’ll write a book once he’s home, and it’ll make a big splash in the academic community, he just knows it!

When he does leave our world for his own, he’s relieved. In his book he makes it sound like this magical wonderland of things beyond most people’s comprehension, but to those close to him he tells them the truth. He was not a fan.

Zevlor:

Zevlor is apprehensive at first. This world is strange – he does not know the customs at all. But he's eager to learn.

He spends his time amongst the people more so than the other two. He is so curious about the traditions of the land, the history of the world, and hearing it from the mouths of the locals is better than getting his hands on any book.

He immerses himself in the cultures he comes across as much as possible; he eats our food and sings our songs and actually has a really good time with it.

I think he finds special interest in the history of combat, how our conflicts have changed throughout time. How did we go from swinging swords and shooting arrows to battling wars from across the world?

Zevlor also tries to teach people of our world about where he comes from. He tells stories from his days as a Hellrider to anyone who will listen and even tries to cook some traditional Elturian food, but it’s hard to do so without the same ingredients.

Overall, he’s more interested in the shared knowledge of culture and information between our world and his. It brings him comfort finding similarities between such different worlds.

When he finally can go back home, he shares his stories with the children first, spinning them tales of the people he met and the things he did. How even in such a foreign place there were still nice people willing to help and to share and to be a friend.

Zevlor is the one who wishes to come back the most.

#bg3 #bg3 dammon #bg3 rolan #bg3 zevlor #dammon #rolan #zevlor #baldur's gate 3 #my writing #requests/suggestions #dragomermacorn #HCs

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sil-te-plait-tue-moi · 2 months

Text

Siamese dream.

Quick summary: Rust observes you.

Word count: 936 words

Warnings: N/A

A/N: Quick drabble! Written as an exercise to get me ready for a longer story, maybe a second part to that first smut fic.

***

Considering the magnitude of existence, he didn’t technically have time for you.

Rust was good at his job, and it was worthwhile – these were the two things that he told himself when the spiralling tide of loneliness threatened his way of life, the two things that he would tell another if ever prompted. Man’s propensity to violence was so prominent and intimidating that he had long reasoned that the most efficient way to live, to continue (at least outwardly) as a functional member of society, was to accept that evil existed. With this, of course, came its partner: punishment was required, deserved. If Rust had to live, he would be worthwhile, be productive, deliver this. He would not look away.

He was an extraordinary machine, quick of tongue and sharp of wit. If he viewed himself as such, his day-to-day would not have to bear the burden of attachment, the thing with teeth and claws, the root of all great wars, sustenance to the crimes of passion for which he was condemnation.

You were not welcome in his thoughts.

Sure, he had a wiring for people-watching, for assessing and contemplating their movements and likeness for some kind of mental filing system – he knew this. Within the first moments of becoming acquainted with Marty, his robust, heavy handshake, swaggering stride and gap-toothed grin had told Rust all he needed to know about his new partner. He enjoyed it, he thought – not in the instant action, but rather the satisfaction of watching an individual act exactly how he’d expected them to. It brought some aspect of calm into Rust’s life, made it easier to talk, to blink, to breathe. Not peace, exactly. Predictability. Science.

He had seen you before and therefore was not disarmed by the practiced smile that had greeted him for the first time, nor the way its gladness seemed to seep right into your tone. He figured that you were easy to laughter, to friends. For a moment, with both your two hands still tenderly enveloping his one, which was rigid and itching to recoil to his own self, he briefly considered adopting these qualities. Rust had accepted his nature and did not particularly care to re-evaluate what was so hopeless and stubborn—but your warmth had elicited a guilt he rarely felt. This guilt usually only resurfaced when he was around small children, untouched by the horrors of humanity. He felt like a corruption, like the rot in his bones might be contagious as well as parasitic.

You were no use to his work. Consequently, you were no use to him. He did not need nor want you in his life. Before long, the agitation in response to what he could only assume were attempts at friendship—a miraculous mug of black coffee ritualistically at the edge of his desk every Monday and Friday—had to have subsided into rationality, revealing him to the conclusion that you were lonely.

An awful thing the brain can be, really. The miraculous organ, conscious of consciousness: the self’s most potent deception, its most invisible betrayal.

Rust knew he was not good for other people. He barely considered himself to be a person. He accepted carefully measured amounts of exposure to satisfy the human’s reptilian desire for connection: this was safest when by proxy. He could spare himself and those around him the difficulty of introspection, which seemed inevitable in all relations, by simply observing.

You were so desperate to connect. He could feel it radiating from you, almost tangible, in gentle, glowing waves. Then again, you would never speak unless spoken to. To begin with, he attributed this phenomenon to introversion. Then, perhaps it was due to femininity: there was a heightened perception, he found, in Louisiana for a wife, a mother, a daughter, a whore, to accept any and all treatment from men, as it was well-meant or well-deserved. He overheard Geraci say something about how well you had accustomed to the transfer from Brooklyn. “Nothin’ like Cohle.”

It'd bother him some: to feel you looking at him; when Marty would mention you in passing; when his body would tense in unfamiliar hesitation when he would glimpse your colours through the slits in the files room units. Apparently, you were funny. He agreed – there were times when he would overhear a sly remark or smartass retort and huff to himself in amusement, protected by his and your turned backs. He knew you could work someone well: you near always exited the box victorious. If you weren’t—victorious, that is—you were solemn, quiet, cagey. You always went back for what you needed, sometimes more. In his own way, he knew you. He was grateful that he had never looked at you or spoken to you long enough for you to know him.

People who considered themselves perceptive usually thought they could crack Rust, turn him inside out, read him. They tried to hold his eyes, tried to make him uncomfortable to prove their lazy, shallow, unoriginal theory that he was shy, that he was misunderstood. What a surprise for them, then, when he would push back with a flat stare, unblinking, inexorable.

He thought it entirely viable for you to do the same. He almost hoped you would, bitter, hoping for the opportunity to win against you, to destabilise the perception you had of yourself – that was the parasite talking. He almost hoped that you might be arrogant underneath, so that he could dislike you as he disliked most at the precinct. He waited for you to approach him.

But you didn’t. You just left coffee on his desk, which he always drank.

#rust cohle x reader #true detective season 1 #rust cohle #i’m going insane #i love the smashing pumpkins

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shimmershy · 1 year

Text

Thunderstorms (Undertale Fanfic)

The fanfic I kept talking about is finally finished! >:) I haven't written a full story in ages, so it's not the best thing in the world, and I feel like the pacing leaves a lot to be desired, but I enjoyed writing it. Also, I came up with the idea in like... 2020, so I'm mostly just glad I finished it at all lol.

Summary:

The rain outside your window is loud, but your thoughts are louder. Now that everyone's settled onto the surface, even you, the past is behind you for good, but your bittersweet memories are endlessly trying to crawl their way out of the recesses of your mind to take hold of you again. You don't think you would be able to handle this on your own. Luckily, you don't have to. (Written from Chara's POV, second person.)

Characters: Chara and Frisk

Word count: 4,465 words

(Ao3 link in reblog!)

You awake to a buzzing in your head, a stabbing in your eye, and a flash of light from outside. Thunder booms, rattling you to your bones. Your heart beats violently in your chest as you sit up and tilt your head up to the glowing stars on your ceiling to catch your breath.

The rest of your room is dark and silent, save for the hammering of rain outside and the steady, quiet breathing from across the room, Frisk’s. Another flash fills your vision, momentarily illuminating the room before casting it into shadow again, and another crash of thunder follows – barely two seconds after, you note. As your pulse returns to normal, you notice the prickly yet comfortable chill in the air. As the panic ebbs from your body, you find yourself alone in the dark.

Reflexively, you bring your hand up to your left eye, only to wince in pain as your fingertips brush the petals clustered there. Right, right. You’d forgotten. You groan and wrap your arms – also speckled with little clusters of golden petals – around yourself. Another nightmare, you conclude. By some stroke of luck, none of the details stuck with you, but you can still feel the darkness and the fear in the corners of your consciousness, lingering with all the allure of a memory just out of your reach. Perhaps if you weren’t so used to this routine already you could find it within yourself to be frustrated, but right now you just feel tired. You know you won’t be getting back to sleep tonight, though. You never do after a nightmare.

Part of you wants to go to Mom – she could offer you a hug and some comforting words, which you could really use right now – and another part of you wants to wake up Frisk – they’d understand – but the part of you that wins out is the one that doesn’t want to be a burden. So you stay curled up on your bed and listen to the rain instead.

The drops on the window are so thick and so numerous that they all just coalesce and run down the glass in a single, constant stream. You keep trying to single out a couple to watch them race, but none of them last long before melding with the rest of the raindrops. The water distorts your view of the backyard; it’s a sorry sight, all mud and leaves.

The weather has been like this nonstop lately. It feels like the dark clouds are here to stay, permanently, like this is your new reality and you have no choice but to get used to it. You don’t mind it, really. You’ve always liked the rain. Besides, having a body of your own again means you’re sensitive to things like the sun and the heat, and you absolutely hate it, to say the least. The sun can stay hidden for as long as it desires. But you can tell it bothers Frisk a lot. You can always tell when something is bothering Frisk; after sharing a soul with them for so long, there’s very little they can hide from you. Staying cooped up at home isn’t their speed at all – they’d rather be out exploring or playing with their friends – but there isn’t much that can be done with all this rain. Unlike you, they thrive in warm and happy places, and this bleak weather has been weighing them down like a sack of boulders.

That’s the thing about Frisk. Everything about them exudes warmth, really. Their selflessness, their optimism, their smile… They really are the “sunshine child”, aren’t they? They’re the kid who could show mercy to a kingdom full of monsters trying to steal their soul. They’re the kid who could stay determined through it all, so much so that not even death could stop them. You feel a smile tug at the corners of your mouth, tinged with bitterness. They’re the kid who broke the barrier, and they’re the kid who saved monsterkind. They were able to do what you failed to do, and then they found a way to bring you back, too, just to tie everything up with a pretty, perfect little bow. Because “everyone deserves a second chance”, as they say.

It makes you want to laugh.

…

You pull the blanket tighter around yourself instead.

At first it bothered you, the way they’re so much better than you, that they succeed in absolutely every area you fail. It was certainly…painful, to watch them clean up all your mistakes so easily, to see how perfect they were, in everything they did. But eventually you realized that they definitely weren’t perfect, actually. They were just a lot better at acting as if they were. In some ways, the two of you are like two sides of the same coin, and with time, you’ve grown to love that. Haven’t you? They even out your rough edges. They keep you grounded and stop you from doing stupid things. And in return, you’re their voice of reason, a loyal friend who will listen and won’t hold back an honest opinion. Not to mention a practically limitless source of information who will gladly (and proudly) help them with their homework.

The fact that they tolerate your near-constant presence at all confuses you, but…you’re glad they do. What would you do without them? Honestly?You glance over at them, snuggled up in the covers on their bed across the room. You don’t even want to think about what you’d do. You surely couldn’t handle living again, or the complications that come along with doing so, or just being here, without them. It was their idea to try to help you get a body of your own again, but of course you’d agreed, because you had been sure you’d intruded on their life enough already. They’d followed through with it, too, all the way to the end, despite all the moments when it seemed impossible.

The pattering of the rain continues steadily in your ears as you reminisce. They had stayed right there by your side when you stepped into the sunlight on your own two feet for the first time in so long. They sat there at the top of the mountain with you for what felt like hours while you took everything in, felt the sun on your skin and the blades of grass between your fingers, and they waited until you felt ready to see everyone else again. They held your hand when you saw your parents, when Mom and Dad could finally see you standing right there in front of them, tears streaming down your cheeks as you tried to push all the words you wanted to say past the lump in your throat. They didn’t complain when your grip became so tight you worried you might break their fragile fingers. They know how hard all of this is for you, and they don’t mind spending time with you when you don’t want to be alone. They feel more important to you than the heart in your chest that shouldn’t even be able to beat anymore.

They understand you in a way no one else does, in a way you doubt anyone else ever could. You wish there was a way to tell them just how much they mean to you, but you know by the time all those feelings are condensed into words they become nearly meaningless anyway. It almost makes you wish you still shared a soul with them, so they could understand your feelings just as clearly as you could understand theirs, but something tells you they already understand, to some extent. You hope so.

You groan and pull your blanket over your head, as if you’re trying to quiet your thoughts with it. Even with the rain, it’s too quiet. And your thoughts are too loud, like a bunch of buzzing bumble bees that could sting at any moment. You don’t want to be awake right now. You don’t really want to be asleep, either. You need to leave your room.

Sneaking another glance at Frisk’s side of the room to make sure they’re still asleep, you slip out of your bed and pad to the door as quietly as you can. Of course your blanket is still wrapped around you. For comfort. The door doesn’t creak very much, luckily. You know how inconsistent it can be. You’re cautious as you shut it behind you.

The hallway seems to swallow you up tonight. You can still hear the rain, but it sounds more distant in this part of the house, and everything looks like a shadow in the darkness that your eye is slowly adjusting to. You ignore it and make your way downstairs to the kitchen. Maybe you could make yourself some hot chocolate, make the best of being awake against your will. You think there were some packets in the cabinet.

Gentle, dim light streams in through the kitchen window. As you make your way to the cupboard to grab a mug, you’re overwhelmed with a sense of peace and tranquility. You feel it in every part of you. There really is nothing to compare with the feeling of being alone in the middle of the night, with the sound of rain enveloping you. You’re glad that none of the bedrooms in this house are very close to the kitchen, because the microwave can be a little loud. You lean against the counter as the mug spins round and round inside of it, humming away.

You have a better view of the backyard down here. There isn’t much to be seen in the middle of the night with all this pouring rain, but your house backs onto a peaceful forest that you and Frisk have explored many times. There’s a small creek a little ways in – you’re sure it must be overflowing by now – and a huge, fallen tree with clusters of mushrooms growing from it in various places. It must have kept watch over the forest for well over one hundred years before meeting its inevitable fate, certainly the oldest tree in your backyard. It must have been around since before you climbed Mount Ebott even. The first time you and Frisk came across it, you picked up a few flowers laying nearby and set them on the rotting log, and the two of you held a little mock funeral for it. You felt somewhat bad about, ironically, outliving it, which must sound strange, but Frisk understands.

With all this rain, the flowers must be long gone by now.

The lightning and thunder are almost simultaneous now. You jump a little as the kitchen is flooded with light, and in that moment, the microwave starts beeping. Shoot. You rush to open the door and take the mug out and almost burn your fingers in the process. You must’ve gotten too lost in thought.

Setting the mug on the table, you pour in the hot chocolate powder and begin to stir. The spoon makes a little ting! each time it hits the side of the mug. You try to direct your thoughts in a less dangerous direction, more towards thinking of the future rather than reflecting on the past. What are you going to do tomorrow? (Or, well, later today. A quick glance at the microwave’s little digital clock tells you it is past midnight.) Maybe you could read a book, or work on your most recent knitting project. Even if the rain did let up eventually, it would be too wet and muddy to do much outdoors.

The hot chocolate is still very hot, but you brave a sip anyway, because of course you do. Bad idea. Now your mouth is on fire. You squint your eye in disappointment.

Hopefully Dad’s garden is still salvageable after all of this. You know how much effort he puts into maintaining it, and you enjoy helping out with it whenever you visit. You would hate to see all that hard work go to waste, and just when it was finally getting somewhere, too.

It always felt weird, when you thought about it for too long. You used to garden with Dad when you lived in the underground, too. You used to drink tea with him in the living room and have long talks, just like you do now. You used to sit and read with Mom, and knit sweaters in your room when you had nothing better to do. Sometimes it was as if nothing had changed, and you didn’t always know how to feel about that, because eventually, your mind would bring up everything that had changed. And that was a slippery slope of drudging up memories you would much rather leave buried.

You blow on your hot chocolate a bit and take another sip. Luckily, it doesn’t burn off what few taste buds you have left this time. It tastes like warmth and bittersweet memories and home. You feel the slightest tug on your heart and close your eye.

Mount Ebott isn’t visible from the kitchen window, but you picture it in your mind anyway, shrouded in dark clouds and pouring rain, looming in the distance against a dark sky. You don’t have to try very hard; it’s a familiar image. You were ten years old, and your world was hell. It was a mountain, and it promised an escape. You could think of no greater force between two pieces of the universe.

At first, you had been disappointed when you woke up after the fall. But then Asriel found you, and the world didn’t seem quite so dark anymore.

You never deserved him. You knew that then, and you know that now. You…don’t want to think about him. You can feel guilt creeping in like thorns in your skin. Like the golden flowers that rooted themselves in your reanimated body, sharp and painful when you pull on them. You don’t want to think about him…

You hate being around Flowey. You wish you understood him, but you don’t. Time had created a rift between the two of you that not even the abilities of reality-bending determination could fix. It was hard to see him as the same person sometimes. It was harder not to feel guilty when you did. Even Flowey said so himself: Asriel died in that throne room years ago, and he was never coming back.

Your face feels wet and it’s not because of the rain. You let out a deep breath and take another sip of your hot chocolate. You wish you could just get over this – it’s certainly been long enough – but the past still infects your mind like weeds. Ironic, is it not? Ha.

But, no. Despite it all, you could still hear his voice in your head. Soft, as he asks, “Chara, can you tell me about the surface?” You can see the stars in his eyes as you tell him of the ones in the sky. You can feel his head on your shoulder as he yawns, his hands holding onto yours as he tells you you’re not a bad person. You can hear his shuddering breaths as he sits beside your bed and you can feel his fear as if it were your own and you feel a bullet through your- his- chest and-

A boom of thunder that you can feel at your very core startles you from your thoughts and before you know it, your mug has tumbled from your hands and collided with the floor in a manner that is far from quiet. The ensuing silence, however, is deafening.

You don’t even react to it right away. You just stand there and stare at the mess of shattered porcelain and hot chocolate on the floor with a blank expression on your face. You think, This might as well be a metaphor for my life. And then you make a move to clean it up.

Your hands are so shaky as you pick up the shards and there’s a well of frenzied energy building up in your throat. You kind of want to scream. The rain is still hammering against the earth outside. You think about how much Asriel would have liked thunderstorms.

…

You don’t notice the presence of another person in the room until Frisk’s avocado socks suddenly appear in your line of sight. You startle – again, embarrassingly enough – and look up, and sure enough, Frisk is looking at you with an expression of concern on their face.

“You okay?” they whisper. Their curly hair is sticking up all over the place, and they look about as tired as you feel. Immediately, you feel extremely guilty.

You nod. “It just slipped out of my hand... I’m sorry for waking you up.”

They shake their head as they kneel down to help you pick up the remains of the mug. “It was kinda hard to sleep with all the thunder anyways. Why’re you up?”

“Mm…” You hesitate. “Nightmare.” You’d almost forgotten that was why you were awake right now in the first place.

“You wanna talk about it?” they ask, glancing at you as they drop the shards into the trash.

“No, I don’t remember it. It was just hard to go back to sleep afterward.”

“Oh. Okay.”

For a minute, they quietly watch you clean up the hot chocolate with a wad of paper towels, fidgeting with their hands. Your eye is carefully trained on the ground, but you can practically feel them trying to think of something else to say.

“You should go back to bed. I will be alright on my own,” you say, knowing they don’t want to leave you alone right now, because they can probably sense your obvious agitation, can’t they? You don’t want them losing sleep for your sake, though. They’ve done that enough already.

Instead of responding, they grab a chair from the kitchen table and turn it around so that it’s facing the window, sitting down next to you with their knees curled up to their chest and their head resting on their crossed arms. They look at you expectantly.

You sigh and roll your eye but scoot your own chair next to them anyway. “You’ll be tired tomorrow,” you warn them as you get comfortable on the chair and bring your legs into a cross-legged position. “Then we will both be tired and grumpy. Is that what you want?”

They shake their head sharply and scrunch up their face. “Whatever!” They tug on the blanket you still have draped around your shoulders, so you slip it off and pass them one of the corners so the two of you can share. They smile and immediately drop their head onto your shoulder, leaning into you. You hesitate for a moment, but then you lean your head on theirs, too.

“I am more upset than I should be about that hot chocolate.” The sound of the rain fills the empty space between your voices. It almost sounds like it has calmed down a bit, but it’s still pattering away.

“Sorry,” they say.

You laugh. “It’s not your fault.”

If there’s one thing you know, it’s that you don’t need words when it’s just the two of you together. Just being there is enough. The fact that they’re there with you at all immediately makes you feel a little less on edge. It makes the rain seem even more peaceful somehow, now that you get to share it with someone. A flash of lightning illuminates the room, and moments later, the low rumble of thunder follows. It’s nice.

The distant tick of the clock in the living room keeps the time, and you almost think Frisk has fallen asleep with how quiet they’re being, but then their voice breaks the silence. “You’re sure you’re okay, though. Like, really okay?” It catches you off guard.

You open your mouth to reply but find that the words get stuck. Oh. You are okay… You are. But the way they said it makes you aware of a pressure behind your eye, and you think you’re about to cry again. You’re able to mutter out a small “I-”, but nothing else comes out.

Frisk doesn’t say anything, either. You get the impression that they’re waiting for something, and for a moment that makes a frustration build inside you, because you can’t give them what they want, you already told them you don’t want to talk about it, no matter how hard you try you’re never going to get better at letting yourself feel things like they want you to- And now you’re even mad at yourself for getting frustrated with them. You don’t want to be like this. You don’t even…

“I don’t feel like I’m supposed to be here,” you finally say. Your voice sounds small.

Hm. You thought you had gotten over this, too.

“I know,” Frisk says. And of course they do. Of course they do. You can’t tell whether that’s comforting to know or not, but…it encourages you to continue.

“I’m…tired of feeling that way.”

Frisk reaches over to hold your hand.

“I have been for a long time. I thought… I was stupid enough to think killing myself was the answer-” You choke out a laugh, but it might have been a sob. You can’t even tell. “I get to help my family, and in return, I am granted the sweet release of death. Two birds with one stone, right?” Laughter bubbles in your throat and it’s a mess as it escapes you. It’s embarrassing, but you can’t stop yourself. You think Frisk is hugging you – you can feel their arms around your shoulders – but your eye is closed and all you can think about is the bitter taste of buttercups.

“A lot of good that did, huh? I literally could not have failed harder if I’d tried.”

The flowers growing in the socket of your left eye sting. Saying all of this out loud makes you feel sick, but for some reason, right now, you feel like you have to get it out of you.

“My brother is dead, and somehow, I am still here. And I still feel the same! Ha ha! If anything it’s only gotten worse! I should be dead, what, twice over? Thrice? And that’s not even counting all the times we- you died, with all the Resets. Do those even count? Does it even matter…?”

Your awareness slowly slips back into the present moment as you wrap your arms around Frisk. Their presence makes you feel steady, grounded, as it always does, and you subconsciously clutch fistfuls of their sweater in your hands.

“Sometimes all of this just feels like a sick joke. I don’t know. Like…maybe one day, I’ll wake up back… back then, and none of it will have even been…real. Or maybe I won’t wake up at all, ha…”

And maybe that would be for the best.

“I do not deserve any of this…”

Frisk says, “I love you, Chara”, and nothing more.

And somehow, it is enough. You take a breath; it kind of stings your raw throat. “I love you too, Frisk.”

You think about how lucky you are to have them, at the very least.

“For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re here. I think you’re s’posed to be here.”

You nod. It’s all you can manage right now. Because truly, you mean it when you say, what would you do without them? For a moment, you pause and try to soak everything in. You can’t tell whether you feel empty or…relieved. Both, probably. There’s a little bit of guilt there too as you catch a peek of morning sunlight reflected on the kitchen floor. The two of you must have been here for a while…

Finally you pull away from the hug and rub at your eye with the heel of your palm. “Jeez, I’m exhausted.”

“Yeah,” Frisk replies with laughter in their voice. “Whoops.”

You didn’t even realize, but outside, the rain has almost stopped, reduced to nothing more than a slight drizzle. You stretch a little as you stand up from your chair and walk over to the back door, which is on the other side of the room and glass so you can see right outside. It’s very cloudy, but there’s a little bit of light shining over the horizon.

“Oh. It’s kinda stopped raining,” Frisk says as they meet you by the door.

“You wanna go out there?”

“In my socks?” Their voice cracks with disbelief on the last word and you laugh.

“Just for a minute. I need some fresh air.”

Frisk sighs loud and dramatically as they sit on the ground to take their socks off. You open the door – cautiously, as Mom is still asleep and you know this one has a habit of squeaking – and are immediately greeted by a wave of cool air. The comforting smell of rain envelopes you. It’s called petrichor, if you remember correctly, and it’s actually the smell of the soil as it becomes moist, rather than the rain itself. Interesting.

“Ready!” Frisk hops up and bounces on their toes.

You hold the screen door open for them, and the two of you slip outside. Luckily, there’s a little wooden porch here so you don’t have to be standing in the mud, but even the porch is a little wet and slippery. It doesn't have a roof or a cover or anything, so the little sprinkles of rain pitter patter on the top of your head and tickle your cheeks and forehead as you tilt your face to the sky. Frisk is giggling to themself as they splash around in the puddles beside you.

You feel vulnerable. You feel free. You feel terrified… But you feel safe. You think to yourself, this is what it means to be alive. To feel raindrops on your skin, to splash in puddles with your sibling, to feel the relief that comes after crying and to wait for the sunrise. And you wish this was something you could understand all the time, something you could always keep in mind when your thoughts start drifting in dark directions again. It’s so easy to forget how beautiful the world can be sometimes, when you’re always stuck in the shadows. Sometimes you need someone to remind you of why you’re here.

Frisk reaches out to you and does a little grabby-hand motion, so you take their hand, and the two of you spin and dance around the porch, kicking up rainwater. For just a moment, everything that lead you to this moment feels worth it.

#safeutdr #Undertale #chara dreemurr #my writing #fanfic #fanfiction #frisk dreemurr #chara #frisk #undertale fanfiction #Undertale Chara #Undertale frisk #frisk Undertale #Chara Undertale #my art #🌼

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web-spinning · 2 years

Note

merc reactions to getting a new recruit but finding out they’re only in their mid-teens ? gender neutral please-

A / N - Ay, it's here. Somehow I managed to finish this faster than I expected. Hope you like it, dear anon!

Also, half of the photos are kind of meme-y, but you know what? It works...Please tell me if it works, I am losing my mind trying to find a good quality comic cut out, but only find those.

Mercs with a recruit in their mid-teens

TW. Ask to tag.

Scout

- he's not much excited, in fact he's a bit scared you might take his place,

- but after he finds out you're younger than him...he's so happy!

- he will teach you so many things,

- how to play basketball, how to get along with the older men, even how to deal with your first crush,

- since he is barely a few years older than you, he feels like as an young adult it's his priority to make sure you know all this stuff,

- he's got seven older brothers, all the lessons are probably from them,

- he really feels like you're just his younger sibling,

Soldier

- Jane thinks it's his duty to make sure you know the rules of war,

- he will show you how to use weapons, maybe even let you touch his own weapons,

- " But only for a few seconds, I don't want your young, inexperienced civil hands to spoil them! ",

- he will sit you down in the meeting room of the base, and tell you stories,

- half of those stories aren't real, but you don't want to make him sad, so you just listen,

- on the battlefield, he will follow you around to make sure you don't hurt yourself...or use your weapons incorrectly,

- also..." You do know basic history of your beloved country, don't you, hippie? ",

Pyro

- this Phoenix adores you,

- will invite you to tea parties,

- you will also get a plushie or two from their collection,

- you're the only person other than Engineer who takes them seriously, that's why they like you so much,

- their childish personality helps you cope with the fact you've been sorted out as a mercenary at such a young age,

- always there when you're feeling down,

Demoman

- in all honesty, he has mixed feelings about you,

- he can't invite you to the drinking nights with the other guys, you're just always left behind,

- in recompense, he tries to teach you how to use the sword in the meantime,

- you might never use that skill in the battlefield, but at least you have a thing that takes your mind off of the gravel wars,

- when you're down, you both watch soap operas together, because he's the only one in the whole team who likes them,

Heavy

- Misha just avoids you,

- at first, you think he's just a big, tough guy who dislikes teenagers to look more " deranged ",

- but finally, one of the men, possibly Medic, explains to you why he dislikes being around you so much,

- you remind him of his younger self and his sisters. The way he had to fight to protect them, the awful place they lived in for a while...everything comes back to him when he sees young face,

- you try approaching him about it, but he still remains silent,

- deep inside, on every mission he keeps a close eye on you, making sure you're safe,

Engineer

- Dell is now your step-dad, that's how it works,

- he needs a few energetic bones to help him with his projects, so you will often stand around and hand him tools when he asks for them,

- while he's working, he will tell you different stories about the other mercenaries,

- you ask him to adjust your weapon's, because they're a bit too big for you to handle freely,

- on warm days, he will take you out for a short walk to make sure you won't go insane,

- he assures you that you can tell him about anything, and he will help,

- he does in fact help, especially when it goes with your emotions,

- he's always there to cheer you up when you're sad, or share a smile with you when you're happy,

Medic

- he's so happy with you! I mean, such a fresh canvas to test on,

- every week he asks you to replace your heart with an Uber-handling one, and every week you refuse,

- but when he's not in his mad scientist mood, he's always ready to help you with some of the downsides of growing up,

- he's also very helpful when you're feeling insecure about your body ( all teenagers do that, right? Not only me, right? ),

- " Oh, don't vorry, zhis vill go away. Zhe average of healthy patients your age look zhe same as you ",

Sniper

- you never knew his first reaction, because he's rather quiet about it,

- but after a bit, you learn that he's actually very trustworthy, and big hearted,

- when you're down or one of the other mercenaries, you go to his camper,

- you both play board games there,

- he will most likely take you out fishing or camping during long weekends,

- you like listening to him talk about his adventures from the bush, but he will leave out the gorey details out,

- at some point, he just feels like an older, wiser, quiet brother to you,

Spy

- he's mad. Not at you, at the Administrator for even thinking about hiring you at this age,

- he doesn't see the reason why there must be a new mercenary, so he mostly avoids you,

- until during one of the missions, you save him for getting headshoot point blank,

- he does acknowledge you a bit more after that,

- you're not allowed in his room though, it smells too much like cigarettes in there,

- maybe he seems cold on the outside, but when he sees you struggling with your work, he will always help,

- helping you however makes him remember he couldn’t see this stage of his son’s life…that makes him feel miserable.

#team fortress 2 #tf2 #tf2 headcanons #tf2 mercs #tf2 x reader #tf2 x reader platonic #tf2 scout x reader #tf2 soldier x reader #tf2 pyro x reader #tf2 demoman x reader #tf2 heavy x reader #tf2 engineer x reader #tf2 engineer is dad #tf2 medic x reader #tf2 sniper x reader #tf2 spy x reader

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snailor-bee · 7 months

Text

Marco x NB!Reader / SFW / 2.1k Summary: Marco is finally going to confess to you! If only it would stop going wrong... Notes: Written for @op-xreader-zine! All the art is done by the amazing @issatheartist thank you for working with me on this! ;w;

This was it! Marco was finally going to do it. He was going to walk up to you and confess.

He'd been crushing on you for a while now and it was time. He'd dealt with the teasing from his brothers and the nurses for far too long. Originally Marco had held himself back because he hadn't wanted to ruin what the two of you already had.

Friends, nakama, family.

Still, everyone had insisted that he go for it and had completely ignored his reasonings for maybe why he shouldn't—"Marco, you can't seriously use your rank as an excuse; the only person higher than you is Pops"—so that's how he found his hands sweating, wrapped around a bouquet of flowers.

Maybe it was a bit simple but at this point, Marco figured it was better than nothing. His head felt like a jumbled mess and he hadn't really planned out how he was going to do this but he'd wing it as he went along, all Marco had to do was find you and—

So distracted by his thoughts, he bounced off someone's body made a little oof of pain.

"Marco!" Izou's voice broke through his thoughts. "Watch where you're going. What are you doing?"

"I, uh," he couldn't bring himself to say it. Izou was the ship's gossip and if Marco said he was looking for you in order to confess then you'd hear about it before Marco even got to you. Sweat beaded at his brow as Izou's sharp gaze took him in. Uncharacteristically, Marco knew he looked nervous.

Which might as well have been blood in the water for a shark, when one was dealing with Izou.

Then all at once, Izou's posture softened and he smiled. "Are those for me?? For my birthday!? Oh, you shouldn't have, these are my favorite too!" Still gushing, Izou grabbed the bouquet and Marco was too stunned to stop him.

"A-ah, yes. I was worried you wouldn't like them, yoi," he said, going for a smile. It was a bit strained but Izou didn't seem to notice. Marco cursed himself internally. He'd been so focused on the almost-not-quite-confession, Izou's birthday had completely slipped his mind.

"No, they're perfect ," Izou enthused happily and Marco sighed fondly, letting the anxiety of confronting you fade. He could always do it later.

The next 'attempt' wasn't really an attempt.

Marco had been walking down a street when his inner phoenix noticed a section of smooth rocks. Without too much thought, he reached out and snatched one up. He frequently did this; the drawers in his office were filled with random bits and bobs, shiny pieces of metal, rocks, and other random things that appealed to his phoenix half for whatever reason. Marco never mentioned it to anyone but a few of his brothers who had been around him for years had picked up on it, though they were kind enough not to point it out.

So, without much thought, when he saw you chatting with some other shipmates, Marco ambled over and handed you the rock. "Here, for you."

You raised a brow and looked into your palm before running your thumb over the stone's surface, feeling out the texture.

Inside, his phoenix cooed and Marco was grateful he wasn't in his half-form. He could tell that his tails would be going wild right about now, watching your reaction.

"...Thanks," you said at last, sounding confused before you pocketed the rock and turned back to listen to the story that Ace had been in the process of telling. It didn't deter Marco at all, you had accepted it!

Feeling thrilled somewhere deep in his bones, he barely felt the jab to his ribs.

"Hey," Thatch whispered, "you know they aren't a bird, right?"

Confused, Marco cocked his head. Thatch gestured at you with his chin. "They probably don't know why you just handed them a rock. Shouldn't you be doing more, uh, human courting stuff?"

There was a few seconds of incomprehension before the meaning hit him and Marco felt like dissolving into dust and disappearing forever. He leaned over to bury his head into Thatch's shoulder to cover up the sound of his groan of pain as his brother laughed and patted his back.

"Don't worry, you'll get them next time, birdie."

Next time ended up being a love letter.

Old fashioned? Maybe. But Marco was getting desperate. At least this would be crystal clear.

He'd gone through numerous editions. The trash can in his room was overflowing with failed attempts, bunched up balls of paper scattered around his desk as he tried again and again until he finally felt he had it all down.

Exactly what about you that made him smile, how the simple sight of you lifted his spirits and the sound of your laugh made his chest tight. He'd bared it all.

Walking across the busy deck, the night breeze ruffling his hair, Marco was barely able to return the greetings he got as he passed by scattered groups. He'd locked eyes with you right away and once you noticed him coming, you'd said your goodbyes and were coming to meet him halfway.

The closer and closer the two of you got, the more and more nervous Marco became. The butterflies in his stomach were making him feel like he might throw up. What if you didn't return his feelings? What if you thought the letter was lame?

What if you went to read it right away? Oh fuck , he hadn't thought this through. He didn't want to watch your face as you read the confession, heartfelt though it may be. If you had to turn him down after he poured his heart onto the parchment, Marco really didn't know how he was going to take that.

Saying it to your face, letting you turn him down gently without realizing the true depths of his feeling was way more appealing.

His step faltered before a rush of heat flashed beside him. On instinct he tossed the letter into the roar of fire. Ace was likely showing off and didn't even notice the slight disturbance.

"What was that?" you asked, finally having made your way to him.

"Nothing," Marco said quickly. "Someone did their report so badly, so I had a bunch of corrections but thinking it over I realized I'll just have them redo it. Makes it easier, yoi."

You laughed. "Harsh. I'd hate to be them, putting in all that work for nothing."

Marco shrugged, trying for nonchalance. "Yeah but I'm sure they'll get over it."

"Wow, Marco, you're not very good at this are you?" Ace asked with a snicker. Marco glared, fork paused midway to his mouth. Thatch elbowed him good-naturedly from his side. They were sitting in the galley, the shipmates talking around them creating a symphony of noise that easily hid the conversation from others.

"Good at what, yoi?" Marco asked, placing the fork down. Thatch threw an arm around his shoulders and shook him lightly as Ace's eyes sharpened with glee.

"Now Ace," Thatch said, mockingly sweet, "don't go teasing our resident birdbrain here. He's trying so hard, the poor thing."

"Get off," Marco said, irritated as he pushed at Thatch until he let him go, laughing.

"Think they've even noticed?" Ace asked thoughtfully before shoving something into his mouth and chewing loudly.

Marco opened his mouth to answer but Thatch beat him to it. "Hopefully not, though Marco looking so pathetic has been quite amusing." Thatch batted away his hand before Marco could punch him in the ribs, the bastard.

Grunting with annoyance, Marco looked away just in time to catch you several tables away leaning your head back with a laugh and he stared, heart suddenly in his throat. He couldn't help it, you were just so—

"Plus the whole ships been taking bets at this point," Thatch tacked on and Marco tore his gaze away from you.

"What?!" Marco demanded as Ace hooted joyfully. Thatch shrugged, grinning all the while.

"Maybe you shouldn't look like a lovesick bird all the time and we wouldn't have to take bets on when you finally get your act together. Do not" —Thatch pointed a steak knife menacingly in Ace's direction after a garbled noise had started— "talk with your mouth full. Swallow."

Dutifully, Ace swallowed his barely chewed food and took a second to catch his breath before barrelling on, "Whatcha got planned next, Marco? Anything good?"

"Excuse me? All my ideas have been fine so far!" Two blank looks had his hackles raising but before he could argue more, your voice rang out.

"Hey, Marco!" Immediately he whipped his head up and caught your eye. You waved before you arrived behind Ace, patting him on the shoulder. "I was wondering if we could spar later?"

Quickly, he nodded back. "Yeah, that sounds great!" Embarrassingly, he heard his voice hit a slightly higher pitch, almost as if his voice had cracked. Ace and Thatch did a terrible job at stifling their giggles as Marco felt his face flush traitorously.

"Great!" you enthused, apparently having not noticed. "See you after lunch?"

Not trusting his voice, he nodded and you skipped away happily. Once you were far enough away, Ace and Thatch collapsed into loud laughter, Ace banging on the table as Thatch wheezed out between his laughs, "What are you Marco, twelve ?? What was that?!"

"I hate both of you," Marco grit out between clenched teeth before shoving his half finished tray of food at Ace. "Finish this, I'm leaving, yoi."

"Good luck on your dateeee," Ace managed to yell out before he got too far away. Marco flipped him off over his shoulder.

"So, Marco." You looked uncharacteristically anxious as you fidgeted and looked at everything except him. Marco felt his stomach drop to the deck. What was wrong? You hadn't... noticed had you? Fuck, this was not how he wanted you to find out.

He'd come to find you for your spar after Ace and Thatch had literally laughed him out of the galley. You'd seemed eager enough to see him before dragging him to a quiet part of the deck, mentioning you had something to say first.

Seemingly steeling your nerves, you looked into his eyes and they burned with determination.

"I've liked you for a really long time now. You're literally one of my best friends and more than that you make me feel like I can fly, like nothing could ever hurt me. I didn't really want to mention this and have it ruin our friendship but I can't keep it to myself anymore. Please go on a date with me!"

Time seemed like it stood still as he gaped at you. He could see your cheeks flush, likely with embarrassment at your proclamation but he was still reeling.

Finally, you swallowed. "And if you don't feel the same—"

"No!" he cut in, finally finding his voice. Marco grabbed up your hands, cradling them close. "No, don't. Just, I—" He chuckled with wry amusement before pressing a chaste kiss to your knuckles. "I'm just a little shocked. I've been trying to ask you out for ages now."

"Wait, really?" you asked, mouth dropping open. He nodded with a smile. There was a strange buzzing in his body, from his toes up to the tips of his ears. Everything felt a little fuzzy, a little warm. He wanted to run around the deck like a teenager again, grab you close and never let go, scream over the railing until he ran out of breath. So many different emotions were raging through him, he was beginning to feel dizzy from the weight of all of them.

Deciding to just pick one, he wrapped his arms around you and pulled you close into his chest, breathing in your scent as he began to chuckle lowly. You joined in and soon the two of you were full-out laughing. When you separated, he brushed a hand against your cheek reverently, giddy that he was able to do so.

"To be honest," Marco began, "I don't think I can spar right now, I feel like my knees are made of jell-o."

You laughed again. "That's okay, I'm feeling the same. Wanna go tell Pops instead?"

Marco ran a hand through his hair, before smiling at you. "Sure. We're about to get the teasing of a lifetime."

You held out a hand and he took it, fingers twining together with yours like they were meant to be.

"We may as well get started," you said back, fondness shining in your eyes and maybe, just maybe, a hint of something more.

#one piece #one piece x reader #marco the phoenix #marco x reader #marco the phoenix x reader #bee writes #bee writing

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tsukishumai · 1 year

Text

Love Galore

pairing: kuroo tetsuro x f!reader x bokuto koutsro

chapter summary: an introspective view of the story's events from the beginning — through the eyes of Akaashi Keiji

wc: 19.2k+ [jfc i really am so sorry]

a/n: thank you to those that have stuck by me and this story, despite my hiatus. i truly appreciate every single person that's ever read a single word of LG, or left lovely messages/comments, from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much. i worked on this chapter, little by little every day, and i promise i never stopped thinking about you guys. i kept thinking it was done, but apparently i had a lot to say haha. this still isn't the end, but please enjoy the chapter, i've worked really hard on it and i hope you like it :) your love and support mean the world to me, xoxo

Masterlist

chapter 14 ✧ souffle pancakes

Akaashi doesn’t say much, but he sees it all.

It was a habit that he’s had for as long as he could remember, practically born with. Practically second nature, it seems, for him to keep a keen and sharp eye on his surroundings, making mental notes until it’s all piled up and cluttered into his brain. He’s been called many things in his short life. Observant. Perspective. Attentive. Psychic. Genius. Creepy.

Akaashi prefers to just be called Keiji.

Most of the time, he thinks it’s a blessing.

When he was younger, he’d impress all the old ladies in his neighborhood with his mindless comments.

Have you lost weight?

That’s a new jacket isn’t it, oba-san?

Oh, that must be a different perfume you’re wearing today.

Comments that sounded adorable coming from a child, when all the others in his age range could barely notice if they were even wearing matching shoes.

Sometimes, he’s thankful. It was what got him so far in the sport he loved, after all. His ability to see things others usually just brush to the side — how an opponent grits his teeth and flexes his jaw right before he jumps up for the spike, or the directions their eyes tend to flicker to right before they pass the ball. How the twitch of their lip meant anger and annoyance, or the restless running around the court showing impatience.

Akaashi sees it all – each bit of information sorted into the compartments in his mind, saving it for when he needs to make his move. This wasn’t something inherent – it was a skill he only learned with time, through trials and errors until his mind became a well-oiled machine. Eventually, it’d become difficult for anyone to escape the sharpness of Akaashi’s eyes, and it’s a skill he’s always used to his own benefit.

If that player’s angry, it will be easy to bait him. If he’s impatient, then it’s just a matter of time before he makes a mistake. And Akaashi will be right there waiting.

It was easily applicable outside of the court as well.

In the hallways of school, he’d learned to ignore the giggles and whispers in his wake. Making friends was simple, almost effortless. An off-handed comment about someone’s new haircut, bringing his classmates snacks and drinks as if he had just accidentally bought too much at the convenience store – not a single person thinking twice at the fact that he’d miraculously gotten all their favorites.

Akaashi was the guy that would notice if you were wearing different nail polish, or if the charms on your backpack were different, would note if you’ve started a new sport or were talking about that new drama just a little bit more often – and he’d say a something that could be compliment, with only a few words at best, but it was enough for you to note that he was paying attention.

In his second year of junior high, he’d even become quite the hot topic among the girls in his class, because somehow he could always tell who had a crush on who. They’d flock around his desk like vultures, picking at whatever bits and scraps they could get from his carcass until he had no choice but to throw them a bone.

If you get this bread for Yagi-kun, he’ll really like it.

Arakawa-san told me he likes girls with short hair.

Toku-san studies in the library on Wednesdays, you should bring him a drink.

The boys would try to act like they’re not interested in the commotion that always seemed to surround Akaashi. Gossip? That’s for the girls – not something for boys to partake in. But it was only a matter of time before they’d come running to Akaashi for a “psychic reading”, never wanting to admit that all they really wanted was a bit of guidance.

They’d come running back to him, tittering and snickering whenever his advice would work. Suddenly, he was seen as a genius, a guru – as much as any preteen boy could actually be.

It was easy, really – a person’s body language can often tell you much more than words could ever manage to say, and Akaashi had always been an avid reader. He’d try to tell them as much, try to teach his friends what to look for and where, but alas the ability had still been dubbed a ‘gift’.

But sometimes, it can be a curse.

For a long while, there were only two kinds of people in Akaashi’s life: those that wanted to use him for his talents, and those that seemed to resent him for it.

It was actually comical how fast it is for some to turn their backs. Flipping around on him like a switch, taking all the brightness with them and leaving Akaashi alone in the dark.

He had learned – the hard way – that most people actually quite hated the notion of being perceived. It strikes them with a sense of anxiety that was unfamiliar – not exactly fear, but something akin to uneasiness. The constant feeling of eyes on your back was enough to drive anyone crazy, even more so when you’re meant to be somewhere safe.

It’s not as if Akaashi was doing it on purpose. Sometimes, he wasn’t even aware he was doing anything at all. He wasn’t watching anyone specifically, but was it his fault if certain things caught his attention? Was it wrong for him to be observant of his surroundings? His classmates were part of his environment, it was only natural for them to be part of his observations as well. It was nothing personal, it was just a habit.

It was difficult to explain as such when a boy from his class called him a stalker for knowing he was in the soccer club, because how else could Akaashi have known? He hardly knew Akaashi. Even though Akaashi pointed out the grass stains on his socks and the pair of cleats peeking out of his bag, the boy still threatened Akaashi to stay far away.

It was even harder for him to calm the angry girl from two classes over – the one that happened to always eat at the lunch table next to his in the cafeteria. He froze when she stormed up to him, tossing a baby blue hair clip on his table. Steam was billowing out from her eyes, saying she’d only ever spoken a grand total of six words to him, so how the hell does he know her favorite color? Never mind the fact that her earrings, her phone case, her jacket, her thermos, and her bento are all that same color. It was an educated guess, one that was clearly correct if her angry reaction was enough to go by.

It was frustrating, honestly. Did she even know how pathetic his own classmate looked, sniffing around Akaashi and asking how he should approach the cute girl from class 2-C? Was it really wrong for Akaashi to suggest getting her a hair clip in the same color? What difference did it make whether he figured out random stuff about her or not?

But the scowl she threw in his direction had almost successfully masked the panic that swept through her eyes. But Akaashi had seen it.

She was afraid. Of him.

She had called him names then, names he had heard before. Weirdo. Stalker. Creep. Names that never bothered him in the past, but coupled with the look of fright on this girl's face – whose favorite color he knew, but name remained foreign – all of it sounded much harsher than he ever remembered. Especially when she dumped the rest of her milk on the top of his head.

After that incident, there was a sort of shift in public opinion on Akaashi. The whispers that followed him down the hall no longer mingled with soft giggles and smiles. They were whispers behind narrowed eyes and scowling faces, disapproving frowns upon any lips that would say his name.

Some friends stood by his side, half-heartedly defending him in a way that told him they didn’t actually care – they just wanted to stay on his good side. Nosy busybodies that only shielded him from the wary stares so they could keep asking him for his advice on whether he thought Dairiki-kun like girls with bangs or without.

It was one of the few times Akaashi had really, truly felt pathetic. His life was sitting in the sweaty palms of his peers, and a single wrong move will have him crushed by their grubby little fingers. It was infuriating, suffocating – having to think twice, thrice, four times before Akaashi could even say a single word.

But they had already decided on the box they would put Akaashi in, and he could do nothing more than sit still. Sit still and ignore the sneers and scowls from people that he used to call friends. Stay quiet when the boys of his class would shove him around the halls calling him freak. Look the other way when he’d come back to his desk and his things were destroyed. Ignore the pang in his chest when he ate his lunches alone in the library.

At the turn of his adolescence – his first year of high school – Akaashi decided that things needed to change.

Fukurodani Academy was a different setting – different classes, different halls, different people.

He would be a different Akaashi Keiji. No longer putting himself out there, or offering his observations to anyone who would listen. He would just keep to himself, and not let anyone close enough to contain him again.

Then he met Bokuto Kotaro.

The boy was simplistic in nature. Kind and bright, with a horde of people that always followed him around wherever he went. Dozens of eyes constantly tracked his every move without fail, and Bokuto happened to be the type of person that thrived in such an environment. Though, despite being interested in the same sport, Akaashi never felt the need to become a part of his entourage. He was exactly the kind of guy Akaashi wanted – needed – to avoid.

But some things are simply not up to him. Each morning, he managed to mask the slight surprise on his face each time he walked into the volleyball team’s gym, and found that Bokuto was already there. And had probably been there for who knows how long. When Akaashi joined this team, he fully expected to always be the first to show up, and last to leave the gym each day, just as it was at his previous school.

Yet, there Bokuto was, every morning without fail, nothing but his grunts and the echoes of the ball spiking on the ground filling the gym. Every morning, he’d greet Akaashi with too much energy, the corners of his lips never dropping despite the fact that Akaashi never responded with anything other than a silent nod.

For a little while, that was all they had. A silent agreement to work together on the sport they loved, to be a team on the court, and strictly teammates off of it. Nothing more, nothing less. Bokuto continued being his charming self, scoring victories and basking in adoration as he was wont to do. Akaashi stood content to the side, satisfied with the joy of knowing his serves were in the capable hands of such an ace.

Akaashi should have known that it was only a matter of time until Bokuto would flip everything around.

They had been alone in the gym for at least an hour at that time, while the rest of Fukurodani Volleyball Club had gone home at an actual reasonable hour. The sun was already slipping past the horizon, taking with it the last tendrils of the day’s light. Bokuto had begged Akaashi to stay a little longer and help with his spikes, as usual. And Akaashi was quick to agree, as usual.

What was unusual was the way Bokuto kept glancing at Akaashi from the corner of his eye, and Akaashi wanted to laugh at Bokuto’s pathetic excuse of being discreet.

“What is it?” Akaashi asked, uncharacteristically breaking the silence.

Bokuto jumped, startled that Akaashi noticed him watching. It took a second for Bokuto to gather himself, absentmindedly bouncing the volleyball on the gleaming gym floor, face scrunched in a way that Akaashi had only seen while Bokuto was on the court.

“I wanted to ask you something,” Bokuto opened with those words, bouncing the ball one last time before catching it tightly in his hands. Akaashi’s silence was the only indicator of an agreement, and Bokuto took this as his cue to continue.

“Why do you hold back?”

There were many things Akaashi thought Bokuto might have asked. This one wasn’t even really on the list. Akaashi had forgotten what it felt like to be caught so off guard, unable to do anything but stand stupidly as his mind buffered. Bokuto’s pupils moved imperceptibly quickly, raking themselves all over Akaashi.

“I’m not sure what you mean,” Akaashi replied carefully, his shoulders rigid, nervously clasping his hands in front of him.

Bokuto frowned a little deeper, resting the volleyball now between his arm and his hip. “You don’t have to lie, Akaashi. I can tell you’re not… I see how you watch everything, but you always catch yourself before doing anything. It’s like you’re scared or… or – I don’t know! But you are, you’re holding back! I can just tell.”

It took all of Akaashi’s willpower not to let his jaw hang loose, only allowing himself to blink slowly. He dug through his mind, searching through every crevice for any memory of someone being able to read him like this. He went out of his way to be invisible, yet the overly cheerful, happy go lucky, sunshine ace of the volleyball team had somehow managed to still see right through him.

“So why?” Bokuto prodded again, and his tone could easily be confused as haughty, but Akaashi knew better. Akaashi continues to study Bokuto, the poor boy fidgeting under Akaashi’s frigid stare. But he doesn’t move, doesn’t back away. His weight shifted from one foot to the other, but he still waited for an answer

“It’s a long story,” Akaashi said quietly, turning around to walk towards the volleyball cart.

He hoped that would be the end of it, that Bokuto would take the hint and leave him alone. But before he could take more than three steps toward the cart, it clattered loudly and rolled away with the momentum of the volleyball that just landed into it from across the gym.

Akaashi turns back to Bokuto, a single eyebrow raised incredulously at Bokuto’s now empty hands. A corner of Bokuto’s mouth lifts devilishly, and he offers Akaashi nothing but a shrug of his shoulders.

“I’ve got a bit of time,” Bokuto rests his hands on his hips, shifting all his weight onto one leg. Akaashi wanted to laugh, wanted to cry, and wanted to ask Bokuto why he even cared. He was happy with how things were right now, and there was no need for him to do anything drastic.

Even as the thought passed through his mind, Akaashi could feel no truth behind it. And one look at Bokuto told him that he was not winning this round. He crossed his arms in front of his chest, and heaved out a sigh.

“If I don’t hold myself back, then people tend to get intimidated,” Akaashi offered, and that was as much as he was willing to expand on at this moment. “And when people are scared of you… that’s when you find out how nasty they can actually be.”

“So what? You’re scared?” Bokuto asked, and Akaashi scoffed because of course he wouldn’t understand. Everyone loved Bokuto, and even those that didn’t still held some sort of respect for him. He was the ace of the volleyball team, and he was the school’s heartthrob. What the hell would he know about being shunned and isolated?

Akaashi opened his mouth to say something snarky, the words burning up his throat and on to the tip of his tongue. Except when his lips parted, it wasn’t his voice that came out.

“If you hold yourself back because of random, faceless people, then aren’t you letting them win?” Bokuto interrupted Akaashi before he could speak, as if he knew that if he let the setter say whatever he was about to say, then the conversation would take a dive into the worst. “I hate losing, Akaashi.”

“What does me losing have anything to do with you?” Akaashi asked.

“Because we’re partners now. I got your back, and if you lose, I lose,” Bokuto smiled this time, and Akaashi’s chest felt a little bit lighter, “Like I said, I hate losing. So don’t make me into a loser, okay? Or it’s gonna be a problem.”

Bokuto brushes past Akaashi as he finishes speaking, hands resting on the back of his head as he walks the distance across the gym and to the volleyball cart. Akaashi’s eyes followed him in awe, a sudden fluttering in his heart and stomach as the ace digs out a new volleyball and bounces it twice onto the hardwood floors.

“We’ve only done eighty serves,” Bokuto changes the topic seamlessly, continuing on as if he hadn’t rendered Akaashi speechless, “We gotta do at least twenty more before Yamiji-san comes back to kick us out.”

Akaashi felt his feet move, his arms positioning themselves to receive, his body running around the gym until sweat dripped on the floor all around him. But his thoughts were elsewhere, plagued with memories of a past that had apparently silenced him into a pathetic existence. He’d thought this path would be better, make him feel like he belonged.

Maybe for a while, he convinced himself that it did, satisfied with existing as a shadow on the wall. He hadn’t anticipated Fukurodani's golden-eyed Adonis to shatter the illusion with so much ease, Akaashi wonders how he ever fooled himself into believing it in the first place.

They didn’t say a single word to each other for the rest of their practice. Or on the walk home. Or at morning practice the next day. Bokuto didn’t speak to Akaashi until the middle of their afternoon practice, when Akaashi had received every single one of Konoha’s spikes and gave Bokuto elegant, risky serves that had everyone on the other side of the net scrambling on their feet.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” Bokuto exclaimed while pumping his fist, giving Akaashi a pat on the back that made the setter jerk forward two steps, “Keep that up, Akaashi!”

Akaashi rubbed the back of his neck, tilting his head slightly to the side. That’s when he noticed the thumbs up Bokuto had thrown you from across the court, and the relieved smile you returned as you flipped the numbers on the scoreboard. You and Bokuto held each other’s gazes for a moment longer, and Akaashi felt like he’d eavesdropped on an entire conversation.

You shivered slightly when Bokuto broke away, as if Akaashi’s icy stare washed over your entire body. Then you turned your head unnaturally quick and met Akaashi’s stare dead on, making him jolt. You offered him a small wave and half a grin, but before he could respond, Bokuto was dragging him back into the game.

After practice, Akaashi found Bokuto waiting for him by the gates of the school. He flew into an immediate tirade about the bad grade he got on his exam, and how the cafeteria ran out of katsu before he could get there. You showed up in the middle of Bokuro’s story, and the three of you started walking in sync towards the direction of Akaashi’s house, your voice mingling with Bokuto’s as you offered your own tidbits of the day. Akaashi didn’t question how you both knew where he lived, or why he was suddenly flanked by the two chattiest students in Fukurodani. But if Akaashi had known that was how it would all begin, then he might have cherished that moment a little bit more.

He never really spoke to you during his initial months in the club, which isn’t saying much as he didn’t speak to anyone. You were nice enough – always asked him how he was doing, berating the older ones whenever they’d give him a hard time, giving him reassuring smiles whenever he got scolded for messing up. The perfect example of a manager; your only fault being the nonsensical hearts in your eyes whenever they happened to land on Bokuto.

You tried to hide it desperately, but there was no hiding the affection in your smiles whenever they were directed toward Bokuto. It was obvious, painfully so, and it bewildered Akaashi that Bokuto still had not noticed. He can at least assume Yukie and Kaori knew, if the worried glances they threw at each other behind your back were of any indication. But if they or anyone else on the team were aware of your feelings, they respected your efforts enough to keep their thoughts to themselves.

He couldn’t blame you, not in the slightest. Not when Akaashi’s own heart skipped a beat or two during the night of that initial confrontation, and suddenly he himself was enamored by the ace – wanted to give him the best serves, set up the best plays, win him all the games. When Bokuto was on the court, then it was natural law of the universe for Akaashi to use every skill in his arsenal to make sure he shines. Akaashi did not choose for it to be this way, it simply is.

Perhaps that was how it was for you as well, Akaashi thought. Sometimes, the most painful part about love is having no choice, the complete loss of control. Akaashi could see it; the groan after each stolen glance, shaking him off when his hug made your face too hot, how you would slap your cheeks whenever you caught yourself staring, like a desperate attempt to break yourself out of some wretched spell.

If Akaashi was being honest, he hated seeing you that way. It didn’t take long for you to become someone precious to him, maybe even quicker than it took for Bokuto. Bokuto infuriated Akaashi as easily as he amazed him, each day a toss up on whether he admired him or wanted to strangle him.

But you brought Akaashi comfort, and a sense of understanding he’d never experienced from a friend. Sure, technically it was your job to assist the team, but he could tell that everything you did truly came from your heart. You were kind and selfless, the type of person that would give someone the very shirt off your back but still spit venom at anyone that spoke ill of your friends.

To have you in his corner, Akaashi couldn’t even begin to explain how much it saved him. He’d been drowning in the middle of an ocean, nearly overpowered by turbulent waves when Bokuto had given him a boat, and you’d given him an oar. As long as he remained with the two of you, then Akaashi thought he could get himself through it all.

So whenever he would watch you watch Bokuto flex his muscles to the girls cheering in the stands during a game, watch you gripping your clipboard so hard your knuckles turned white, he may feel... a little bit more than annoyed. And whenever Bokuto would then openly flirt with some of those girls after the game, Akaashi could admit that he might even feel a little bit upset.

Because how could he not see the way you look at him, how you smile when he says your name, how you trail after him like a lovesick puppy? At this point, Akaashi’s been friends with the two of you for months, won and lost countless games, gone to training camps, spent more time with each other than with your own families. And the entire time, Akaashi had to work very hard to act like he didn’t notice your feelings. How could Bokuto still be so ignorant?

It really bothered him a lot more than he cared to admit, and it surprised him. Akaashi never expected to care about you the way he does, but there it was. Maybe it was this comfortable closeness between you that propelled Akaashi to act so boldly, in a way he couldn’t bring himself to in a long time.

At the end of one of these unsavory games, while Bokuto busied himself with trying to get the number of a cheerleader in the stand, Akaashi scanned the court for a second, stopping only when his eyes landed on you. You were comparing your notes with the coach, and Akaashi waited until you finished speaking and Yamiji-san stalked off to scold someone else before he approached.

“Keiji! There you are, I wanted to talk to about your receives in the first set, you –”

“Are you ever going to tell him?” Akaashi asked, not even registering what you were saying. You might have been irritated at his interruption if you hadn’t been confused by the seemingly random question he just threw at your face.

“What? Tell who what?”

“Bokuto,” Akaashi crossed his arms and straightened his back, “Are you ever going to tell him how you feel?”

You blinked at him once, the only indication that you heard what Akaashi said. He stood facing you, and the seconds seemed to stretch as you did nothing but stare back. The cacophony of sounds that usually bounced along the walls of the gym suddenly sounded muffled and dull. Your lips twitched slightly before they spread into a rehearsed grin, your face slipping easily into a mask of casual indifference.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Keiji,” you answered him softly, shaking your head.

“Come on, Y/N,” Akaashi groaned, “You know exactly –”

“No, I really don’t,” you said almost pleadingly, your eyes darting around the gym, a mixture of sadness and relief in them when you see Bokuto still showing off to the girls that descended from the bleachers. You look back at Akaashi, brows furrowed as you said, “I don’t know what would make you even think that. Bokuto’s my best friend – that’s it. God, Akaashi, you should really be careful about what you say. If someone heard you, they might have gotten the wrong idea.”

You shot him another hard look – almost a glare, and one that he could read very well, that told him you knew he knew you were lying, that said please, just play along – before you made an excuse of gathering up all the other players for the bus back to school.

Akaashi’s feet felt stuck to the ground, an achingly familiar helplessness sluicing through him as you walked away. He couldn’t even bring himself to move until Bokuto threw an arm around his shoulder to drag him out, finally done with his flirting and ready to go home.

You were already seated on the bus when Bokuto and Akaashi finally deigned to board. The seat beside you was occupied by a chattering Yukie, who refused to move despite Bokuto’s complaints of always being the one that sits next to you. You laughed sheepishly and yelled claims of ‘manager bonding’ and doing everything you could to avoid meeting Akaashi’s eye.

That was the tone of your relationship for the next few weeks. An awkward tension that no one else seemed to notice but you and him. You didn’t treat him any differently – you still greeted him with a smile, walked home together everyday, still messed with him during practice. You still asked him about his day, and told him about yours and Akaashi almost could have convinced himself that nothing was wrong.

But everything you did started to feel like an act. Disingenuous, like a robot following a set program. You stopped sitting next to Bokuto at lunch, started walking to classes with your other friends instead. Your eyes started flicking to Akaashi whenever you felt you laughed too loudly at Bokuto’s jokes, and you latched yourself to the other players, throwing everyone off kilter.

You were going out of your way to prove a point that only Akaashi could understand, and even when Bokuto himself had pointed out your strange behavior, you simply brushed him off. There was a sense of insecurity that Akaashi knew he instilled in your actions, and it brought a twinge of regret that he never wanted to feel when it came to you.

Akaashi had been pouring over how to remedy the situation for days when an olive branch came in the form of Bokuto’s new girlfriend.

She was a girl from another school, and he met her after one of their games. She came over to their side of the court and congratulated Bokuto for thoroughly defeating her team. She was very pretty and he liked her smile, so Bokuto had asked her out, and she was very quick to say yes. She was waiting for him one day after practicing, standing patiently at the entrance gates with a bag of homemade cookies in her hand.

Bokuto was so excited as he ran out of the gym to meet her, sparing one minute to ask Akaashi to let you know where he’d gone. Akaashi supposed it was a little comforting to know that Bokuto genuinely cared about you, even if it was encased with his own selfishness.

Akaashi waited until the rest of the volleyball club had emptied the gym before he made his way into the equipment room. He could hear your sniffling before he even opened the door, his heart slowly crumbling when he walked in on you crouched behind the volleyball cart.

You sat on the floor, hugging your knees to your chest. Your forehead rested against your knees, and your quiet sobs filled the tiny room. You didn’t bother to look up as Akaashi approached, and fought his own tears as your shoulders shook with every breath.

He kneeled in front of you quietly, silently debating with himself before he placed a tender hand on your shoulder. You continued to cry, taking uneven, shaky breaths. You didn’t move from your position, and Akaashi briefly wondered if you’d even registered his presence.

“Did he leave?” You asked suddenly, voice thick and hoarse.

“Yes,” Akaashi answered.

Slowly, you lifted your head to face him. Your eyes were puffed and swollen, eyes rimmed with red and cheeks stained with tears. Snot dribbled down your nose disgracefully, and there was a sorry attempt on your part to wipe away the evidence of your heartbreak. The sleeves you’d worn your heart on were now soaked with salty tears, and you couldn’t control the tremble of your lips.

Akaashi didn’t know what else to do other than wrap his arms around you. The position was awkward and he’s pretty sure he’d actually never hugged you before. He felt you stiffen for a second, almost making him pull back. But then you buried your face into the crook of his neck and cried. Akaashi could feel his shirt begin to soak, but he pulled you tighter against him.

He had no idea how long he held you for, but he stayed there in that smelly old equipment room and he held you until his knees ached and you had no more tears left to give.

Neither of you spoke once you were done, giving him a sad smile as you pulled away. He didn’t offer one back, but he helped you up to your feet and kept an arm around your shoulder as you both walked out silently. Akaashi knew there was nothing he could say to soothe the pain, and you didn’t look like you wanted to say a single word about it anyway.

He simply walked home with you as usual, taking the long way around to ensure you both end up walking by your favorite takoyaki stand. He spent the money he was saving in his wallet for a rainy day, and bought you all the food you could eat. He had even gotten your favorite popsicle from the convenience store by your house, and though you still remained silent, he was happy to see you eat everything he gave you.

By the time Akaashi dropped you off at your front door, the tears were long gone and the moon was high in the sky. You turned to Akaashi, nervously fiddling with your fingers as you tried to find the words. Akaashi smiled to himself, and reached out to pat his hand lightly on the top of your head.

“It’ll be okay,” he said, hoping you’d believe him. The lonely smile you gave him tells him you don’t, but you hug each other one last time anyway before saying your goodbyes.

Akaashi remembered the first time you and Bokuto successfully broke through his brick walls. Broke might have been too gentle of a word for it though – smashed through might be better. It was at the start of his second season with Fukurodani, and he was still riding the high of an amazing first year. He was ready for an even better year, ready to try out his new skills at the first practice match Yamiji-san had arranged with a school the team had never played with before.

Then a familiar voice called his name from the other side of the court. A few familiar faces from a life he was desperate to forget peered at him through the net, chuckling and laughing and asking him where the hell he’s been for the past year? Akaashi froze – completely and pathetically froze. It was only after six missed serves and accidentally smacking Bokuto in the back of the head with a ball did Yamiji-san finally tire of his antics and benched him for the rest of the game.

Akaashi ran to the locker rooms as soon as practice was over. He didn’t acknowledge his old classmates, didn’t even pretend to be polite or engage in empty pleasantries. Instead, he hid in one of the shower stalls until the rest of the team left and he was absolutely sure there would be no one left to see him leave.

But when he exited the stall, there you were. Standing next to Bokuto in a locker room he was absolutely sure you weren’t allowed to be in, with your hands on your hip and brows etched in concern. The two of you cornered him, and barricaded him until he fessed up about what the hell just happened on that court. Akaashi was a resilient man, but even he could do nothing against you two.

So he told you everything – from his ‘guru’ days to the milk dumping incident to the isolation and bullying – everything. He didn’t stop speaking for what felt like hours, but neither you nor Bokuto interrupted him once, allowing him to regurgitate everything he’d been holding in for years.

When he was done, he wasn’t sure what he expected. Pity, or sympathy or something like that. But, no. Instead, when he looked at the faces of his two best friends, all he saw was anger. Clenched fists, tight jaws, fire burning in eyes – anger. And it made him happy. Whatever happened in his past didn’t matter, because here, he had two people who were willing to get angry on his behalf.

He thought he couldn’t get any closer to you than he was at that moment. But he was wrong.

Walking away from your doorstep, Akaashi knew the bond between the two of you was solidified after this – having already seen each other at your worst, taking turns being each other’s salvation. You become more than his friend, you were his sister. Sister in pain, sister in darkness, sister in light. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for you, and you for him.

Thinking back, the sobbing was probably a bit of an overreaction. A little dramatic considering Bokuto had broken up with that girl not even three weeks later. He was crying and moaning about it for about ten minutes until you promised to take him to his favorite yakiniku spot, and he never thought about that girl again.

Things would go back to normal for a little while – the three of you acting as reckless teenagers do when they had free reign over the streets of Tokyo. Sitting in cafes sharing one drink for four hours, getting scolded by the coach for staying in the gym too long, laughing and arguing over the most ridiculous reasons that Bokuto turned emo.

Until Bokuto meets his next girlfriend. Then your heart breaks into a million pieces, and Akaashi tries to hold you together. Then Bokuto breaks up with his girlfriend, and comes running back with crocodile tears in his eyes. You’d catch him again with open arms, and things are alright for a little while until the ugly cycle starts over again.

Akaashi tried not to let himself wonder why you allowed yourself to accept this – allow Bokuto to put you through it over and over again. He told himself that he didn’t really care, it wasn’t any of his business. Whether you told Bokuto your true feelings or not was your prerogative, and Akaashi wouldn’t do anything but respect your decisions. Even if the decision seemed borderline masochistic.

Akaashi is forced to simply brush off his irritation at his best friend, because Bokuto was so painfully unaware of what he’d been doing. And if Bokuto was too stupid to see what was right in front of his eyes, then Akaashi was not interested in being the one to enlighten him.

Ultimately, Akaashi does what he does best – keep his mouth shut and his thoughts to himself. He would listen to every single complaint Bokuto would have about his girlfriends, but he never dared offer his own opinions. He allowed you to drag him to whatever random activity would keep your mind off your own issues, but he never outwardly acknowledged the hurt you always tried to hide.

And as horrible it is to say, the girls never lasted very long. A month, maybe two at the most. Hardly enough time for Akaashi to memorize any names, as cruel as that sounded. Soon enough, they would complain about his training schedule, or whine about how he hangs out with his friends a bit too much, and that was all it took for Bokuto to cut it off. Bokuto’s priorities always remained the same, and that at least was something Akaashi happily gave him credit for.

By the time college rolled around, you had even started dating. No one else had ever successfully managed to ensnare your attention for more than five minutes, but Akaashi appreciated seeing you try. Though he admits it was rather amusing to see Bokuto so fervently talk shit about any person you had even a remote interest in, and maybe a little bit more than satisfying to see Bokuto finally be the one on the other side.

Bokuto, surprisingly, never actually brought any of his girlfriends around. He talked about them, and on occasion, he would invite them to some of his games, but that was it. It was odd, because Bokuto had always struck Akaashi as the type that wanted his partner cheering for him at every opportunity they could get, and would want to hear their voice screaming his name from the stands. But on the rare occasion he actually allowed any of them to come watch him, Bokuto was quick to usher them out of the gym before anyone could even introduce themselves.

It bewildered Akaashi to no end. Was it because he was ashamed?Akaashi’s met at least two girlfriends, and Bokuto’s gone on double dates with Konoha and Washio. Was he hiding his girlfriends from you?

Did he finally get a taste of his own medicine when he saw you kiss that guy in your psych class? Was Bokuto trying to spare you the pain? Akaashi didn’t really want to think of the implications if that statement were true.

Well, out of sight, out of mind was a set up that worked for him very well.

And more importantly, it worked well enough for you. Worked for Bokuto as well, apparently. He didn’t want to see any of your flings, and you were better off not seeing any of his. A nauseating song and dance that only the two of you knew the steps for. Neither of you were willing to be each other's partner, satisfied to let the opportunity suspend in the air between you, yet never reaching out to take it.

But hey, if you’re fine with it, then Akaashi could work with this. He could live with this.

That was until Hikari came along.

Akaashi was honestly a little surprised – Hikari wasn’t typically the type of woman that Bokuto would tangle himself with. That wasn’t to say anything about her looks, or her personality – she was very much Bokuto’s type. But she had already been an essential part of at least one aspect of his life before they started dating, and it was unusual for Bokuto to allow a relationship to transpire with someone so close – the manager of his team, at that. Bokuto always dated outside the proximity of his circle; someone that went to another school, or one that he met at the gym, or sat next to him in one of his classes.

Never anyone too close. Never anyone that would matter if he lost them.

But apparently, Hikari was a woman on a mission. Akaashi knew it from the first time he met her, could see it in the wolfish gleam in her eyes as she watched Bokuto from across the room.

He was a little taken aback, but not all that shocked when you came home from that party, practically giving him a heart attack when you burst through the front door and stormed directly to the couch. You didn’t spare him a glance before you face planted onto the cushions, buried your face into the decorative pillows he’d spent two hours picking, and let out the most ungodly scream he’d ever heard.

You didn’t have to tell him what happened; Akaashi could easily guess.

“What’s wrong with you?” he still asked slowly, afraid any sudden movements might cause you to lunge.

“I wish I knew,” your voice was muffled, not bothering to lift your head from the pillow.

A nagging voice in his head told him he should have stayed at that party, to be your emotional support at the very least if nothing else. He mentally kicked himself, glaring at the laptop he sat in front of, and the blinking document of his unfinished part in the group project he was meant to present to his group mates in the morning. As if the assignment was responsible for his failure.

You’d be safe if he left, he reasoned with himself. The volleyball team was full of idiots, but they were all good guys. Besides, Bokuto was there and there wasn’t a single chance in hell anything bad would happen to you while he was around. And if Bokuto was too drunk, then Kuroo at least would make sure you all got home safely. He’d even set himself up on the dining room table so he could see you walk through the front door with his own two eyes.

Because he had fully expected you to walk through those doors with Bokuto in tow like you’ve done dozens of times, and the fact that you arrived in the dead of night alone was enough to make Akaashi’s blood pressure rise.

He stood from his chair and walked the few short steps to the fridge. He opened the freezer door, pushing through packets of frozen meat until he found the cream puff flavored ice cream that you had to special order online. He grabs the pint and two spoons before he makes his way to the couch.

You didn’t move when he pushed your leg to the side, sitting on the opposite side of the sofa. You didn’t move when he nudged your calves with his knuckles and asked you to sit up before you suffocated. So he just leaned back, tossing the lid of the ice cream pint onto the coffee table before digging in.

It’d been two bites of ice cream and one minute later when you slowly maneuver yourself to sit up. Akaashi tried to pretend not to notice you, but it was impossible when you snatched the extra spoon and the entire pint out of his hand in one fluid motion.

“Jesus, watch out for my fingers,” he mumbled, smirking at the glare you shot his way. But you only held the fake contempt until the first spoon of your favorite dessert hit your lips – then you were sighing and leaning your head against Akaashi’s shoulder.

He patted a hand on your knee, reaching over for a scoop of ice cream and chuckling when you blocked his spoon with yours. You tried to hide the ice cream from him, but his arms were long, and he easily snatched the pint back.

“Hey!” you cried out, and Akaashi quickly conceded before you really took out a finger.

“How’d you get home?” Akaashi asked, lifting his feet to rest them on the coffee table and leaning his head against yours.

“Kuroo walked me home,” you replied quietly.

“Good.”

Neither of you said another word as you let the quiet of the evening envelope you, not a single sound save for the occasional clashing of spoons when you both reached for another bite. He could feel you slowly ease beside him, the tension in your body melting away with each passing minute.

When the ice cream was finished, the empty pint decorated your table, along with two spoons haphazardly tossed, surrounded by splotches of melted cream that was sure to be a pain to clean. Your breathing was steady, and the time on the clock read ‘Akaashi is going to be exhausted in the morning’.

He didn’t care, though. You hadn’t moved or spoken in a while now, and Akaashi was convinced you were already asleep. He already prepared himself to spend the night on the couch, your head on his shoulder and his body twisted in a way that was sure to make his back ache the next day.

He was just seconds away from giving into sleep’s lovely tug when you broke the silence.

“I saw him with…” you said, fiddling with the hem of your shirt and clearing your throat, “It was Hikari.”

Akaashi sighed, reaching a hand up to pat your head.

“Are you okay?” he asked again, a pitiful question that he’s repeated to you countless times.

He waited for your usual answer – vehement denial that anything could be possibly wrong, an airy dismissal of his concerns, and a change in conversation so effortless, it almost makes Akaashi forget what he was saying to you in the first place.

This time, though – this time, a weighted silence followed his question, and you looped an arm around his, hugging him firmly.

“Not really,” you admitted softly.

It was the first time Akaashi had ever heard you confess your heartache. It was always something that was unspoken, and seeing your crumpled face made Akaashi regret ever keeping things that way. He turned fully to wrap himself around you gently, and you gave yourself to his embrace. He’d only heard a sniffle or two, but he could feel the moisture slowly seeping into his t-shirt. It was a feeling that was achingly familiar.

“Come on, now. Didn’t we say crying over boys was… I think your words were ‘so fucking embarrassing’,” Akaashi mumbled into your hair, smiling when he felt you chuckle against him. His stomach turned at the inadequacy of his words, but he had no idea what else to offer, so he simply offered himself. “I’m here for you, okay? Always.”

You pulled back for a moment to give him a watery smile. Akaashi wiped at your tear stained cheeks.

“Literally, your snot is dripping down to your mouth, and it’s disgusting.”

Your laughter warmed Akaashi’s cheeks, smacking him on the shoulder before you stood up. You said nothing else as you stalked off into the darkness of your bedroom, not bothering to turn on any lights before shutting the door.

A myriad of emotions swirled through Akaashi as he remained seated on the couch. Was there more that he could have said? Could have done? If he had stayed at the party, would he have been able to stop this from happening? Was it even any of his business to stop it?

But Akaashi knows himself, and knows he would have said nothing if he saw Bokuto sneak away with Hikari. He would have done nothing except perhaps usher you to the other side of the house, using whatever means to keep you distracted. Even if he was there, all he could have done was spare you the knowledge of it – at least for one night.

He couldn’t help but feel as if he failed you then – to be a good friend, a brother. Or maybe he’s failed you for years. You’d never see it that way, could never even fathom the notion of his failure, and somehow that thought bothers Akaashi more.

Akaashi stood up and stalked to his own room. He shut the door and collapsed onto his bed, hatred pumping from his heart through his veins as he drifted off to sleep.

It was that lingering hate he could still feel churning in his gut when he awoke the next morning that spurred him out of bed and scurrying into the living room. He had every intention of starting the day as a new man – one who didn’t allow his cowardice consume him, didn’t place the comfort of his wellbeing over the needs of those he loved.

Those were the thoughts that ran through his mind, but his momentum halted instantly when he rounded the corner of the hallway, and saw you standing in the genkan. You looked like you had just rolled out of bed yourself, eyes swollen and still wearing the clothes from last night. Your hand rested on the doorknob, the front door wide open.

You turned to him as he approached, and gave him an almost pleading look. Akaashi only had to wonder why you were distressed for two seconds before Bokuto barrelled through the doorway, way too loudly and looking much too bright for the hour.

Akaashi has seen this dance before. He’s seen it so many times, the sequence of it already playing out in his mind like a familiar melody. Bokuto comes in with a plan that sounded equal parts ridiculous and exhausting, dragging you out without even asking. Akkashi scoffed as you tried and failed to ward off Bokuto with pathetic excuses, but as usual he was having none of it. And both you and Akaashi knew better than to think you could win against Bokuto Kotaro.

He stood aside while you flurried around the apartment like a blizzard storm, fighting the frown at how Bokuto stood in the foyer with his hands on his hips, a satisfied and smug look on his face. Bokuto turned to Akaashi as if he’d just noticed him for the first time, slapping him on the shoulder before asking, “Akaashi! Why do I feel like I didn’t even see you at all last night?”

It was an effort not to lift a hand and smack Bokuto in the back of the head right then and there. But thankfully, you came rushing out of your bedroom, hastily grabbing a pair of shoes from the genkan. You shot him one last apologetic glance, and you were out the door before he could even bid you goodbye.

And there he stood – alone in the foyer of his own apartment, feeling like nothing more than a fly on the wall.

A glance at the clock was the only thing that could have set him in motion, already running ten minutes later than he wanted to start his day. From the tornado named Bokuto that just passed, and the flurry in which Akaashi himself now dashed around, it seemed the apartment was destined to be chaotic.

He was impatiently tapping his fingers on the kitchen counter, glaring at his coffee machine as if his sheer will would somehow make the brew drip faster, when there was another knock on the door.

The day was already filled with chaos, but apparently also surprises, because the last person he expected to see on the other side of the threshold was Kuroo Tetsuro.

The two boys blinked at each other for a second, Kuroo looking just as confused as Akaashi as to why he came to visit in the first place. Kuroo shifted his weight from one foot to the other with his hands tucked in his front pockets, offered Akaashi a nervous smile and a lukewarm attempt at small talk before finally asking if you were still asleep inside.

Akaashi sighed as he delivered the unfortunate news that not only were you already awake, but were currently being dragged no doubt halfway across the city by none other than Kuroo’s very own roommate.

“Do you guys not communicate or something,” Akaashi asked blandly, and Kuroo just shrugged.

“He wasn’t there when I got home last night, and he wasn’t there when I woke up this morning. What do you want from me?”

Akaashi rolled his eyes, but he still widened the door for Kuroo to slip through, who only smiled at him sheepishly as he entered the apartment. Akaashi asked if he wanted some coffee, and Kuroo graciously accepted, slipping back into the easy, laid-back attitude that he’d always been known to wear.

Content to leave Kuroo to his own devices, Akaashi darted back into his room to quickly change. When he emerged eight minutes later, fully clothed and his backpack dangling from his shoulder, Kuroo was filling up his thermos with coffee while Akaashi’s already sat waiting for him at the counter.

Akaashi nodded his head in thanks, Kuroo handing him his cup as the two walked out of the apartment in tandem. He didn't say anything when Kuroo remained in step with him, chattering about his classes as they embarked on the twenty minute walk to campus. Didn’t even consider that it was a weekend, and Kuroo likely didn’t even have to head in this direction so early at all.

Kuroo stayed with Akaashi as far as the library entrance, the latter almost entering the building before he finally had the frame of mind to wonder, “Wait, so why’d you stop by the apartment today?” Akaashi looked over his shoulder and adjusted his bag a bit higher, “Sorry, I was too distracted by… everything. Did you need something?”

Kuroo chuckled almost guiltily, a crooked smile on his lips. He rubbed at the back of his neck, looking everywhere but at Akaashi as if he was debating whether he wanted to tell him the truth.

“Oh, ha,” Kuroo breathed out, shaking his head slightly, “No, I was just – I mean, y/n looked pretty out of it last night. And I was about to,” Kuroo cleared his throat and adjusted his shirt, “I was heading to that cafe – you know, the one in front of that seven eleven? – and I thought I’d check in to see if she was alive.”

Akaashi’s eyes softened in understanding, pressing his lips into a thin line and nodding his head once as he turned to face Kuroo fully and offered him half a smile.

“Thanks for taking her home last night, by the way,” said Akaashi, “She’s lucky you were still at the party.”

Kuroo let out a breathy laugh and shook his head. He takes a strap of his own backpack off his shoulder and flips it to the front, holding it against his chest as he hastily pulls open the zipper.

“Yeah, it was just good timing,” Kuroo replied while he continued to dig through his backpack. He eventually pulls out a few red packets and hands them to Akaashi, “Here. It’s red ginseng. I’m not sure how long you’re planning to be here, but it should help you get through the day.”

Akaashi examined the red packets in his hand, almost pouting with appreciation to Kuroo. But when he lifted his head, Kuroo was already walking across the courtyard.

“Make sure to give one of those to y/n when you see her!” He yelled over his shoulder, waving at Akaashi one last time before taking off.

Akaashi did eat the red ginseng, and it did help him get through the seven hours he had spent in the library that day. And he never thought twice about Kuroo’s impromptu visit to his apartment that morning, nor did he think twice about being escorted to the library despite the cafe Kuroo mentioned being on the complete opposite side of campus.

Because that was just Kuroo – Akaashi had never known him to be any other way. The very definition of all bark no bite, the kind of man that would tease you relentlessly for a stain on your pants, then take you to a store to buy you a new pair.

Though Kuroo may have been closer to Bokuto, Akaashi had a tremendous amount of respect for the man, and would probably even go so far as to say Kuroo was also one of his closest friends.

And when Hikari started to prove herself a new fixture, and Bokuto’s absence became more frequent, Akaashi was appreciative of Kuroo’s steady presence – still showing up to the study sessions, and coming over to watch volleyball games on Akaashi’s “much nicer TV”, and grabbing hot ramen and a cold beer after a particularly stressful test.

He was acting as the Kuroo Tetsuro he’d always been, and it was that semblance of normalcy that Kuroo effortlessly provided, without anyone asking him to, nor any expectations from anyone else – like a lighthouse in the middle of a raging storm, Akaashi knows it was Kuroo that brought them safely to harbor.

Because Akaashi was waiting for it. Ever since that day you had come home from your outing with Bokuto, dragging your feet through the door, looking like someone had just ripped the world out from beneath your feet, he had been waiting. For the other shoe to drop, for the inevitable descent into madness - at least your version of it.

He felt prepared for it in a way, felt ready. He was no longer going to pretend to believe your fake smiles and reassurances that you were fine while you locked yourself in your room days at a time, and he wasn’t going to let you throw yourself so hard into your studies that you forget to eat.

Akaashi felt things would be different this time around. He’d make sure of it. So he waited for the moment your mask would fall, and prepared himself to catch the pieces.

But the moment never came.

Don’t misunderstand. It’s not as if Akaashi wanted to see you have a mental breakdown for the eighth time in as many years, and he certainly didn’t want to watch you retreat into a shell of yourself as you attempt to reconcile your new reality with your broken fantasies.

Akaashi can see it in your face sometimes, even though you try your hardest to hide it. The exhaustion beneath your red-rimmed eyes, the very slight downturn of your lips when you thought no one was paying attention, and the tiredness in your slumped shoulders, as if you’ve been carrying a mountain on your shoulders.

Still, you always made sure to take care of everybody, and you did it for so long. Akaashi didn’t want to admit to being part of the guilty party, but he had just been as willing to take everything you gave, and believed when you said you needed nothing in return.

It was shameful, and a little bit more than selfish, but a small part of him wanted this chance. To prove himself a worthy friend, that he could take care of the people that mattered to him the most. He almost hated himself for it, for using your suffering as an opening, but he wanted to make up for all the lost opportunities, for the pain his silence might have caused.

It was his turn to take care of you, and he was ready to do a damn good job.

Except, you were fine.

He was thankful, if not a little thrown off by the lack of a depressive episode. But thankful, nonetheless.

More than thankful, though, he was curious. Bokuto was becoming increasingly absent, flaking on plans and ignoring phone calls. Akaashi had never seen him be so serious about a girl, and even he was feeling annoyed about being left in the proverbial dust. Akaashi had imagined you’d be a little more… upset.

He hadn’t noticed any particular changes. Your routine hardly deviated, aside from the occasional dinners or drinks at the bar with him and Kuroo – if you were not in class you were at work, if you weren’t at work you were home, and if you weren’t home you were in class. For a short while, Akaashi felt like he had been living with a ghost, just going through the motions until the sun set and rose again for the new day.

Sometimes, though, he’d find you on the balcony, sitting on the matching chairs Bokuto’s sisters bought for you when the two of you had first moved in. A mug of coffee or tea would be in your hands, the liquid looking as if it had long gone cold. You wouldn’t acknowledge Akaashi whenever he’d step outside to join you. Say nothing as he sits in the vacant seat beside you, staring only out into the blinking lights of the city.

When you were this way, Akaashi knew better than to try and bother you to speak. Your mind was eons away, in a world where Akaashi had never been and would never get to see. So he settled himself to sit beside you silently, until you were ready to climb back down from wherever you wandered off to.

But even those days became few and far in between.

It was something that confused him, like he’d been following a trail of crumbs laid before him, yet had no idea where it would lead him to.

That was, until he walked up to Study room 201 for the usual Tuesday evening session. On a normal day he would simply barge into the room without a thought as to who was already in there or if they were in the middle of anything important. But there was a tug in his chest that halted him in front of the narrow, rectangular window cut-out of the sliding door. He was still as he peeked through the glass, and something clicked so loudly in his brain, his eardrums nearly burst.

Because Study Room 201 was already a mess of textbooks and papers, prohibited snacks and drinks littered the conference table, and Kuroo Tetsuro was sitting next to you.

You were leaning over as you read something on his laptop screen, and Kuroo slightly leaned back to give you some room. Your eyes were roving over the screen quickly, faster than any normal person should be reading. Then you frowned at something, your finger pointing at certain spots as you explained his mistakes.

It seemed like you were ripping into Kuroo’s essay or project or whatever it was he was having you read over, your mouth running off into a seemingly endless tangent of all the things he could have done differently. If it was Akaashi in that situation, his head would probably feel so hot from how irritating your voice surely would have sounded in his ears. He might have shoved you away altogether.

Yet, there was Kuroo Tetsuro, sitting in the seat Akaashi had only ever seen one other person sit in, staring at you as he tried but failed desperately to hide the smile on his face. You turned just as Kuroo’s smile bubbled into a chuckle, and you smacked your pen so hard on his head, Akaashi was afraid he might start bleeding.

Kuroo’s chuckle turned into complete laughter, loud and obnoxious and infectious, it was only a matter of seconds until you dissolved into a fit of giggles yourself.

Neither of you paid him much attention when Akaashi finally decided to open the door. In fact, it seemed as if you hadn’t noticed him at all, despite nearly slamming the door in his haste to enter. Akaashi settled into the seat across from you, as he’s always done, and a small part of him wondered if Kuroo might move back into his usual seat beside him now that Akaashi has entered the picture.

He didn’t. He simply smiled at Akaashi and asked him if he’d like a turn to criticize his work. Of course, Akaashi agreed and thoroughly enjoyed tearing down Kuroo’s perfectly good thesis if only because it made both of you laugh.

Akaashi felt incredibly stupid for not seeing it before, and now that he has, he doesn’t understand how he could have possibly missed it. He stared at the man beside you now, sneaking grapes onto your laptop to get you to eat and wordlessly walking down the hall to fill your water bottle and filling in the seat Akaashi never braved to fill, and the revelations pour over him like a waterfall, loud and rumbling and serene all at once.

He’s glad it was Kuroo.

It was a little painful, though. Not a heartbreak, nor a pang of jealousy, but there was an ache that took hold in his body all the same. And he hated that selfish part of him that was hurt – wishing it was him that could have helped you heal.

But it wasn’t him, and he’s glad it was Kuroo.

Whatever sort of pain or shame or guilt that he was torturing himself with was quickly eased away by the sound of your muffled laughter through the apartment walls during late night phone calls, the color that was beginning to return to your cheeks, and the light that had finally returned in your eyes.

In those following months, you stopped locking yourself in your room, stopped losing yourself in the city lights on that cold, empty balcony. And more than once has Akaashi come home to find you and Kuroo splayed across the living room, either giggling over something playing on the TV screen with beer cans littered across his coffee table, or sitting beside each other in comfortable silence while you both worked or studied.

One way or another, Akaashi would get roped into whatever it was you were doing with Kuroo. And he’ll complain, berate you two for wasting his time on nonsense and tomfoolery, but it was those moments that provided him with a sharp clarity, like he finally has all the pieces he needed for this puzzle.

Akaashi may have been just a man on the outside looking in, but the picture that Kuroo had built with you – for you – was more beautiful and warm than Akaashi had ever thought to imagine. And whether you realized it or not, you now went about your days with a permanent smile on your lips and a lightness in the air about you that Akaashi had not felt in years.

It had filled him with something he didn’t even know he had been missing, as if his lungs were finally taking their first gulp of air after so long underwater. The brightness you started to exude felt as warm and refreshing as summer’s first rays of sun, and Akaashi finally lets himself relax.

Because Kuroo – that son of a bitch, Akaashi could kiss him in the mouth – he had taken the pieces of you that were scattered across the dirty floor, and he’s put together every single shard until you were nearly whole again. He had breathed an entirely new life into you, a mosaic of all the things you thought you couldn’t handle, brought back to make you stronger. You were almost unrecognizable.

But people don’t change so easily, and some habits are ingrained into your bones. Akaashi could already see the beginnings of it. The self-doubt, the fear, overthinking your every word and action. Often, Akaashi felt as if he could hear your thoughts from across the room, his throat constricting as they wrapped around him like a noose.

He didn’t want things to be the same, he told himself. Things were going to be different this time. He’d said it like a mantra over and over again, and now was the time for him to put his money where his mouth was.

And one day, Akaashi was in the kitchen making his usual cup of coffee, you came bouncing – no, literally, you were bouncing – out of your room with just about the goofiest smile he’d ever seen on your face, and it was all the push he needed to step over the line.

He allowed himself that bit of courage, something he’d spent years shoving to the back of his mind, smothered by his own hands.

“Excited for your date?”

“It’s not a date!”

“Would it be so bad if it was?I mean look at you, you’re smiling like an idiot.”

For one, glorious, precious second, Akaashi thought that things would finally work out. The gears started spinning your head, and even though you glared at him, Akaashi could already see a sparkle in your eye, and a hint of smile you tried to hide.

“You know what, Keiji, I’m getting sick of you –”

And it only took three knocks for everything to come toppling down.

The not-so-serendipitous entrance of Bokuto Koutaro was usually accepted with open arms, and an exasperated sigh that wasn’t actually exasperated but a little excited to see what he’s got planned for the day.

But that day, the sight of his streaked hair made Akaashi’s stomach drop to the floor, and hearing the way he spoke to you only made Akaashi see red.

He almost didn’t register the slam of his front door, the blood roaring in his ears too loudly for him to hear your heated exchange. He couldn’t even bring himself to feel sorry for his best friend, pouting like a child whose favorite toy was just ripped from his hand.

Akaashi knew, deep down somewhere in a dusty corner of his heart, that Bokuto didn’t mean any harm. He might have even thought he came here with the best of intentions, that maybe he was trying to be a good friend. And maybe that’s what irritates Akaashi even more, the complete lack of self-awareness, and the obliviousness to those around him – perfectly content with staying inside his own Bokuto-powered bubble.

Irritated, yes. Still, Akaashi couldn’t bring himself to be truly vexed. Not when Bokuto looked just as confused and distraught. Akaashi didn't know what he was thinking, or perhaps he wasn’t even thinking at all, but he couldn’t stop himself. But the worst part of it was, he didn’t want to. Because you were finally letting yourself be happy, and he wasn’t going to let Bokuto ruin it.

“She’s finally moving on. You shouldn’t do anything to mess that up.”

“Just leave it alone, Bokuto-san. Before anyone gets hurt.”

By the time he was finished, the flames of anger Akaashi felt just moments prior had completely died, and he was left with nothing but a taste of smoke and ash on his tongue. He spoke the words a lot more calmly than he felt, a familiar sense of sympathy creeping over his heart yet again.

Because the look on Bokuto’s face was one Akaashi had seen before, but never on him. A mix of shock and confusion, topped off with a hint of anguish and regret. It looked sad enough on you, but on Bokuto, it was heartbreaking.

So he truly didn’t know. Akaashi’s not sure if it made him feel better or worse. He just knew he was finished with this game, and although he couldn’t really understand the gravity of what he’d just done, he didn’t regret it. When Bokuto silently nodded and left his apartment, he felt only relief.

There was an eerie calm that settled in the wake of Bokuto’s departure. You came back from your date-not-date with Kuroo in infinitely better spirits than when you left, back to skipping around the apartment while humming a tune only you could hear, and the morning’s debacle was already long forgotten.

Kuroo, unsurprisingly, became quite determined to attach himself to your hip, with a new sense of comfort and a different sort of tension that Akaashi didn’t feel like addressing. It seemed the encounter with Bokuto had added fuel to more than one fire, and if Kuroo was trying to hide his feelings before, he wasn’t bothering to do so now. Akaashi’s caught the way Kuroo looks at you more than once, and it’s even given him butterflies more than he cared to admit.

Bokuto eventually apologized, and he’d even started bringing Hikari around more. She really was a sweet girl, clearly putting in the effort to get to know Bokuto’s friends. She even desperately tried to ignore Bokuto’s longing looks at a certain blossoming couple, and Akaashi wished he had the capacity to care just a little bit more about the poor girl Bokuto dragged into the tangled web of his heart.

Alas, he was too busy preparing for the storm.

Akaashi had always been an overthinker. It’s in his nature, something inherent in him that he could never shake no matter how hard he tried. Or it could be the result of his younger days hiding behind his fear, maybe it was something he never actually got over. Akaashi doesn’t know. He doesn’t think he knows much of anything these days.

His useless mind was only searching for ways he could have prevented this. If he pushed you about your feelings earlier, would you have ended up with Bokuto instead of Kuroo? Would it have been the two of you laughing and dancing, pouring honey in each others’ ear in a crowded room like no one was watching?

If not for Akaashi, would Bokuto have ever even realized you were in love with him? Were it not for him, would it have eaten away at Bokuto’s very heart until he attacked his own best friend? Akaashi should have kept his mouth shut. If he did, then maybe you might have actually allowed yourself to enjoy being with Kuroo, to let him romance you in the way he’s been aching to do, to let yourself fall in the way you’ve been afraid to for so long.

And if he did, then maybe he wouldn’t have found Bokuto’s white-knuckled fists gripping Kuroo’s shirt in the middle of a stunned crowd, drenched in sticky alcohol and hair in disarray while you were crying in the corner. Hikari wouldn’t have been sobbing in the back of a dirty taxi, fighting the bile rising in her throat from the betrayal of the one meant to love her most.

He wouldn’t have had to drag you home, too stunned into silence to fight him. He was thankful for that, because he knows that if you had seen the look on Kuroo’s face as everyone he loved left him soaked, eyes stinging, and alone… Akaashi would have deserved that punch you’d throw in his face.

There were a plethora of things he wished he said, things he could have done. They played through his mind like an endless reel of maybes and what ifs and would haves over and over again as if determined to drive him insane.

He’s not sure what to do now. He’s not sure if he should even do anything. He was tired, he hadn't eaten in at least twenty seven hours, and when he looked in the mirror that morning, he cringed at the deep purple color that encircled his eyes.

The coffee maker beeped loudly, and Akaashi mindlessly grabbed his mug from the cabinet. His eyes were unfocused, relying on his muscle memory to grab the oat milk creamer from the fridge and mixing in his preferred amount of sugar.

The morning was calm, a stark contrast from the evening before, and Akaashi’s been awake for a lot longer than he’d care to admit. He stirred his spoon in circles, watching the whorls of milk blend into inky water. This was his fourth cup. Four times he’s brewed a fresh pot, hoping to have one ready for you once you step out of your room. Four times the coffee had turned cold, and he watched it swirl against the steel of his sink as he poured it down the drain. Four times he’s walked to the counter to brew a fresh pot again.

He winced when he took a sip, coffee burning his tongue, like one last insult to his injuries. By now, he’s already used up more than half the bag of coffee beans you brought home from work just the other day. He hated being wasteful. He hated drinking more than one cup before he could even eat his breakfast. He hated waiting for you alone with nothing but the sugar granules littering his dining table to keep him company.

He hated the silence in his apartment. He hated the 53 missed calls on his phone from Kuroo and Bokuto. He hated that he was the one who sent Bokuto into a downward spiral. He hated every single face that did nothing but gawked with their phones out while two men – who had never so much as raised their voices at each other – looked like they were two seconds away from ripping each other's throat out.

He hated everything.

But he would still do it all over again. Let the fire he had unknowingly started burn their slate clean. If it means peace, if it means freedom from the cage they built around themselves… then he’d do it all over again, for his friends.

And once it grows cold, Akaashi will brew another pitcher of coffee. He will make himself another cup.

And he will sit in this chair, and he will wait until he sees you walking out that door.

The sun was nearing its peak when you finally woke up.

You cursed yourself for forgetting to draw all your curtains last night, and you squinted against the harsh rays of sun now beating down on your face.

It was an effort to open your eyes. There was crust lining your waterline, stinging your lashes when you tried to flutter them open. Your lids still felt heavy and swollen, and you barely won the battle of keeping them open.

Your head was throbbing, so loudly that it was the only thing you could hear. You dig into your temples with the heel of your palm, groaning as you positioned yourself to sit up. You run your hands along the rumpled sheets until your fingers hit something hard. You dig through a little more, closing your eyes and bracing yourself as you grab your phone.

Dead. Only a black screen stared back, no matter how many times you pressed the buttons. You tossed the phone back on the mattress just as you flopped yourself back down, the both of you landing on the sheets like a useless brick.

You should probably charge the damn thing, but you couldn’t bring yourself to disturb the morning’s peace just yet. You doubt you’d find another moment of it the second you get out of this bed.

Instead, you bury your fingers into your own hair, twisting your body around until your face is buried in your pillow, and you fight the urge to scream into it, too worried that the extra strain might actually cause you to hurl your guts out.

Not yet.

You burrowed even deeper into your sheets, wrapping the blankets around yourself until you were nothing more than a cocoon of self-preservation. Because you weren’t ready to face it. The betrayal you were unknowingly the center of, the years of friendship that was splintered in a matter of seconds, the broken hearts of the people you cherished the most. You weren’t ready to face any of it. Not yet.

As if the cowardly admission was some sort of key, memories began to flood through wide open gates in your head, soaking you all over again with sticky alcohol and salty tears. You tried to push it back, tried to cover yourself, like holding an umbrella in a hurricane. But the waves of memory overpowered you, knocking you off your feet each time you remembered Kuroo’s wide-eyed, vacant look as he watched Akaashi haul you away.

Kuroo.

Tetsuro.

Even a mere whisper of his name still sends shocks through your nerves, makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand straight. The thought of him consumed you so easily, so wholly, like he was a blanket of calm that smothered all your raging thoughts until there was only him. Everything about him made you so dizzy, light headed and out of breath.

Every time you hear his voice, so rich and creamy, it coats all over you like something luxurious on your skin. Forcing yourself to pretend that you’re not breathing in his scent whenever he’s near, pretend that cedar and smoke and warm amber don’t haunt your dreams – it was a tremendous effort on your part to keep yourself sane, to keep yourself from free-falling into the rabbit hole that was Kuroo Tetsuro.

But last night… You could have dreamt all you wanted about what it would be like to have him look at you with shaky breaths and dilated pupils and ask if he could kiss you, and it still wouldn’t have amounted to anything close to actually having him in front of you. It made you want to laugh almost as much as it made you want to cry, because of course Kuroo Tetsuro could make reality surpass fantasy.

You wished the memories could have stopped there, that your night ended with the only kiss that has ever made you feel like you were in the clouds.

But fate was almost as cruel as life.

It was difficult to explain how it felt, for everything to finally click into place while also spiraling into confusion.

You understood with painful clarity why Hikari hated you, why she acted like you were a pebble in her shoe, and looked at you as if your very existence was an eyesore. You remembered that fight with Bokuto, and the tension that never went away even after the two of you reconciled – all the times Bokuto’s mood would plummet at the mere mention Kuroo, each time you ignored the frustrated glances he threw towards the both of you, hoping you were simply imagining things.

Because what reason could Bokuto possibly have to act that way? You thought about it over and over, and could never come up with an adequate conclusion.

Now, your willful ignorance has finally come to pay its retribution, a sort of cosmic joke that you were sure some powers above found absolutely hilarious – because Bokuto Kotaro was in love with you. In love. With you. Has been, apparently, for … you didn’t even want to think of how long, couldn’t comprehend the implication of his confession.

A confession that you vividly remember praying for, words that your heart has longed for and ached to hear. Cried for in the silent void of your bedroom, hoped for in your fractured soul, because for so long, you waited, even just for a sliver for a chance for Bokuto to actually see you as more than a friend, more than just the overbearing manager who followed him to college.

It almost kills you to know that he was waiting for the same thing.

For a moment, you envisioned it. The life you could have had with Bokuto – walking around campus tucked beneath his arm, registering for classes that fit each other’s schedule, wearing his jersey when you watch his games. Maybe you would have joined the team as a manager, and there wouldn’t have been a second you wouldn’t spend together. Bokuto probably wouldn’t have even waited for the first year to end before convincing you to move in with him. The apartment would have been small, but he wouldn’t ever miss a single dinner together.

Every morning, you’d wake up to an empty bedroom, but by the time you prepared two steaming mugs of coffee, Bokuto would have already returned from his morning run. He’d kiss you and embrace you, and you’d get ready for the day together, leave your home together, and come home together.

Grief is peppered through every thought like weeds, mourning for the time lost and each memory that never happened. It would have been a beautiful life together. It would have been filled with love, laughter, and happiness so bright, just imagining it made your eyes burn.

The smell of fresh coffee permeated through the musty, stale air of your bedroom. You could almost see the trail of the scent wafting through the open seams of your door, snaking through the smog until it wrapped around you like a warm embrace. It beckoned you like a familiar friend, so enticing that it actually spurred you to sit back up.

Suddenly, you felt your stomach grumble and the dryness in your mouth felt like ash, as if the smell of arabica beans was that first fallen domino that had all your issues tumbling into each other. You ignored the rush of nausea churning in your stomach that had nothing to do with the amount of alcohol you drank last night, and swung your legs over the side of your bed, feet absently shuffling against the wooden floor until they found your slippers.

You stifled a groan as you stood, and dragged your feet across the room slowly. You snatched the thin robe you kept hung over your computer chair, and wrapped it tightly around your body, taking a deep breath as you closed your fingers around the door knob and twisted it open.

You nearly choked on the wave of aroma that rushed at you so fast, you might have thought you were stepping into an actual roastery instead of your own living room. You half expected to see Akaashi standing over a heated pan, vigorously stirring beans until they turned brown – or however the hell one would roast coffee, you seriously had no idea.

Instead, you found him standing in front of the coffee maker you bought for him two Christmases ago, hands on his hips and foot tapping on the floor. The machine was bubbling and hissing as the coffee dripped slowly into the pot, and the counter was an abhorrent mess that you’ve quite literally never seen Akaashi make in the entire time you’ve lived with him.

“Did you open up some sort of… cafe in our apartment that I wasn’t aware of,” You tried to keep your voice light and playful, but the words scratched at your throat, and they came out sounding tired and rough.

Akaashi could have broken his neck with the speed he turned around, shooting an arm out to catch himself on the counter when his momentum threatened to hurtle his body too far. He regarded you with wide, tired eyes, coffee staining his shirt in four different places, and you had a strange feeling that if you reached up and tried to run your fingers through his hair, you would find a bird’s egg nestled somewhere deep within. He looked – and you were putting this nicely – like absolute shit.

You tried to smile, and his gaze immediately softened, lips coming together into a tight line. And you regretted any previous thoughts you might have had about the malnourished vibe he was putting down., because the pathetic way he looked at you definitely said that you looked about a million times worse.

“I thought I’d give it a try,” he said softly, crossing his arms as he leaned against the counter, “It can’t be that hard, can it? Especially with an experienced barista in the vicinity.”

You clicked your tongue, and gave Akaashi a mocking glare, “You wouldn’t be able to afford my skills and services.”

Akaashi brought a finger up to his lip in faux-thought, and you felt your heart flutter when he opened his arms wide, “I can pay with warm, comforting, and gentle embraces?”

You shook your head, and your slippers slapped against the wooden floor as you hurriedly made your way across the room and crashed into Akaashi’s arms.

“Can’t you be normal and just call it a hug?” Your voice was muffled against his chest, “Who the hell calls it an embrace these days?”

He pulled you against him even tighter, “Literary geniuses, that’s who.”

A chuckle softly escaped from your lips and vibrated against Akaashi’s chest, and it felt like a tether had been snapped. Even more giggles tumbled out, and the fact that Akaashi was not laughing somehow made it even more funnier – made what funnier, you actually had no idea, though at this point you could hear how unhinged your laughter actually sounded. But you couldn’t hold it back, and you laughed until your belly ached, and tears formed on the corners of your eyes.

You laughed until the laughter felt like acid burning up your throat, and the tightness of it made it difficult to breathe. The tears that pooled in your eyes now flowed freely down your cheeks, and there was no stopping it then, not when you choked out a sob, clutched at the fabric of Akaashi’s shirt and cried. While Akaashi rested one hand on the back of your head, and stroked small circles around your back with the other, you wept and you cried. Cried and cried and cried.

Whatever restraint you’d been keeping against your heart was undone by the strength of Akaashi’s arms around you, and knowing that he was there to hold you together… it was enough to have you falling apart.

You don’t know how long the two of you stood in that kitchen for. It could have been a few minutes. It could have been a few hours. Akaashi didn’t falter, didn’t move a single inch. Through each shuddering sob, every heaving gasp for air, Akaashi had stayed. He waited until the shaking subsided, and your breathing evened out, and there was not a single tear left to cry.

You weren’t sure how much time had passed before you peeled yourself away from his embrace, wiping your entire face with the sleeve of your robe. You backed another step, and Akaashi met your swollen, red eyes with his own sunken, tired ones. He tried to smile at you, and tried extremely hard to seem like he wasn’t uncomfortable in his soaked shirt.

“Go change out of that thing,” you said by way of apology, cringing at the mess you’d left behind, “Please.”

For a second, you thought Akaashi might have argued with you. But then his eyes switched from you to the hallway then back again, before he nodded and darted to the direction of his bedroom. You breathed out a laugh and walked to the counter, grabbing a towel from beside the sink and wiping away the coffee grounds that dirtied your usually-immaculate kitchen.

You were sweeping up the stray flecks that littered the floor when Akaashi came barrelling back into the kitchen. Before he said a single word, he snatched the broom violently from your hand.

“Hey, I was –”

You couldn’t finish your sentence, not when Akaashi practically shoves you into a seat at the dining table.

“Stay,” he pointed a finger at you, and you quickly swallowed back the snarky comment you were prepared to throw out. Your eyes just silently followed Akaashi as he fussed around the kitchen, mopping the rest of the floor and shaking his head at you when he realized you’d already cleaned the counters.

He grabbed your favorite mug – drying on the dish rack like it had just been washed after use – then turned to make you a cup of coffee. But when he touched the top of his fingers to the glass body of the pitcher, he frowned. Deeply.

“What’s wrong?” you asked.

“The coffee got cold again,” he grumbled, making you shoot out of your seat and scramble towards him when he yanked the decanter off the hot plate and headed to the sink.

“Stop!” you practically screeched, just barely making it in time to grip his wrist before he could fully pour the contents down the drain. “What the hell are you doing?”

Akaashi just stared. “It’s cold now.”

“So?!” you looked at him like the roles have now been completely reversed, “We can just microwave it or something. You don’t need to throw the whole thing out.” You tried to pry the pitcher out of Akaashi’s hand, but he clutched on tightly.

“I wanted you to have fresh coffee,” he said simply, and you gaped. You looked at him for a second longer before your eyes flick back to the counter that you just cleaned up, and realization washed over you like a gentle shower.

“Did you –” you paused for a second, unsure of how you were going to deal with this situation, “Have you been making a new pot of coffee each time it went cold?”

Akaashi opened his mouth as if to speak, but quickly clamped his lips down to press them into a thin line. You managed to grab the pitcher from Akaashi with no resistance, and rushed to place it back into its proper place on the machine. In your peripherals, you could see a crinkled bag, folded in half and tucked in a corner behind the coffee maker.

“Is that…” you mumbled to yourself before quickly snatching the nearly empty bag from its hiding place, “Keiji!”

He winced slightly when you presented him with the evidence, coffee beans flying astray when you shake the bag in Akaashi’s face.

“I just got this bag, Keiji!” you groaned, lamenting the gallons of your favorite roast undoubtedly swirling through the drainpipes of Tokyo by now. You peeked into the bag, frowning when you saw that only about a fourth of the bag had been saved, “Now I have to wait until next month for the cafe to give me a free one.”

“I wanted you to have –”

“Fresh coffee. I got it,” you sighed, placing two hands on each of Akaashi’s shoulders. Again, he showed no resistance when you pushed him backwards and sat him on your empty chair. He opened his mouth to argue when you grabbed two mugs and poured in the cold coffee, but the glare you shot him was enough to make him shut it. You ignored his searing gaze as it trailed after your every movement, ignored it burning holes in your back while you microwaved the two mugs of coffee, ignored the burn in your throat at the pathetic way he watched you place one mug in front of him, and held the other as you took the empty seat across from him.

You gestured silently to the mug of coffee.

“Drink,” you ordered, and the word made Akaashi instantly grab the handle, “There’s only room for one mental breakdown in this apartment at a time. And I call dibs for today, okay?”

Akaashi couldn’t stop the laughter that broke free, and you couldn’t help but smile at the exasperated way he shook his head. When the two of you lifted your mugs, your eyes met for just a moment, and the smile you shared with your best friend might have been enough to heal your heart.

Then, you took a sip of the coffee, and the moment the dark liquid hit your tongue, you had to fight the cringe, and pretend that the way he burnt this batch didn’t break your heart all over again.

“That’s…” you begin, searching for the words. You coughed instead of finishing your sentence.

Akaashi simply sighed. He reached a hand in his pocket, and pulled out his phone.

“What are you doing?” you asked, watching him slowly slide his fingers up and down the screen.

He gives you a pointed look. “What’s it look like? I’m getting breakfast delivered.”

The sun looked just about ready to set by the time you and Akaashi decided to settle down. Empty take out boxes were piled in the proper compartments of the trash bin, and neither of you have bothered to clean up the crumbs all over the table.

Breakfast had passed by silently, the both of you just content to be in each other’s presence, still sniffling as you shoved entire forkfuls of souffle pancakes from your favorite bakery. You shrieked with delight when you recognized the logo on the bag Akaashi retrieved from the delivery man. You didn’t even scold him for the insane delivery fee he probably had to pay for them to bring it all the way here.

You just crushed him in a tight hug and accepted his kindness with a kiss on the cheek. He sighed in the way you imagined an older brother would about his annoying little sister, despite you being an entire year older. It made you chuckle, especially when he let you break his very strict “no eating in the living room” rule.

If Akaashi had any questions or concerns about the events that transpired last night, he mercifully kept them all to himself. After breakfast, he dug out the kotatsu blanket from the storage closet, and – after screeching to Akaashi that he was banned from making any beverages for at least a month – you brewed some of his favorite green tea.

You laid under that kotatsu with Akaashi for hours, sipping on tea that had long turned lukewarm, talking about things that were of neither importance or relevance. You wasted away the entire day, it seemed, if the setting sun and ombre skies out the windows were of any indication.

Akaashi sat across from you, his back leaning against the foot of the couch. The kotatsu blanket reached up to his waist, and his head lolled lazily to the side as he scrolled mindlessly through his phone. You’d long thrown propriety out the window, though it never is in the room when you’re with Akaashi. You managed to snuggle yourself completely under the kotatsu table, the blanket skirt covering your body while using your seat cushion as a pillow.

Akaashi had gone through tremendous effort to make this day feel as casual as last week’s Sunday morning. You had a niggling feeling that if you let him, then Akaashi would be very content in keeping you inside this bubble of safety and comfort that he’s curated specifically for you. He’d keep the problems that were waiting past these four walls at bay for as long as he possibly could. This, you knew without a shred of doubt.

It was a kindness that you held closely to your heart. One that you knew was the type of kindness that didn’t boast, but wrapped itself around you gently and held you against its chest. The longer you looked at Akaashi, rubbing his finger against his nose and eyes glued to the screen, the more your heart swelled with that affection he generously poured into your cup.

And you knew that because he’s loved you enough to create this bubble, you had to love him enough to pop yourself both out of it.

“Keiji,” your voice felt hoarse from the silence, the words scratching at your throat, “Was I really that blind?”

Akaashi stilled almost imperceptibly, if you hadn’t known him for years, you probably would have missed it. He clicks the button on the side of his phone, and he gently places the black device on the table. He shuffles to move his seat cushion from beneath him and tosses it to the side, settling himself beneath the blanket before laying down to face you.

“You weren’t blind, y/n.”

He said it so gently, probably worried that if he spoke any louder, then you would shatter. It softens your heart as much as it sends a spike of irritation through you.

“Dumb, then? Oblivious? Stupid? Naive? Either way you spin it, it still comes down to my faults, my…” your voice cracks, the traitorous thing, and you stopped to clear your throat, “What word would you use, then, Keiji?”

“Young. Afraid. Hurt,” He says with a lot more force and clarity than you expected, each word striking directly into your heart, “A whole lot of other words before stupid, actually. An entire dictionary’s worth.”

You wanted to wipe that look off his face, really. Eyes misting his usual blue to a foggy gray, and failing to stop his wretched mouth from quivering. How many more people in your life were you going to hurt? You felt pathetic.

You stay silent for a moment before starting, “Bokuto… he must have also been in a lot of pain,” you sighed, turning to supine and training your eyes to the popcorned ceiling, “Everything’s so… fucked up. And it’s all because of me and my stupid ignorance and –”

“Please, stop saying that,” Akaashi groaned loudly, balling a fist into his own hair.

Exasperation floods through you like a tidal wave, it crashes through you viciously and your body shoots itself up into a sitting position before you could even think. You couldn’t hold back the glare at Akaashi before asking him with a bite, “Well, what do you want me to say?”

“I don’t know,” Akaashi answers with a growl, maneuvering himself up to face you, his fists landing helplessly on the table, “but please, stop saying stuff like that, not when–” Akaashi sighed, bring two fingers up to pinch the bridge of his nose, “I knew about everything for… a long time.”

You shrugged carelessly as you replied, “Well, yeah. I know I never actually told you, but I thought you figured it out after… the equipment room incident.”

Akaashi pursed his lips together. “Oh, I did. But I wasn’t talking about just you.”

Your eyebrows lifted, opting to stay silent. Akaashi nibbled at his bottom lip in hesitancy, allowing him the time to process through whatever he clearly wanted to say. You brace yourself when you see him taking a slow, deep breath.

“With you, it was… so fucking obvious. And it wasn’t just because you followed him around, or laughed obnoxiously loud at his dumb jokes. If anybody looked at you for longer than five seconds, they’d see it on your face – clear as day. You looked at him like… I don’t know. Like he made all the flowers bloom, or painted the sunset with your favorite colors or something poetic like that.”

“That sounded pretty poetic to me,” you laugh, though it sounded hollow and despondent in its attempt to hide the gut punch Akaashi’s words delivered. Akaashi smiled ruefully, but he continued.

“My point is – you never had to tell me. I knew it. You knew it. We all knew it. Your feelings were never the big secret you thought it was. Bokuto might have been the only person in this world that never picked up on it. And actually, there was a point in time when I genuinely thought he was ignoring them on purpose. Fuck, maybe he did. I never really figured it out. I don’t really think he ever did either. Because with Bokuto…”

Akaashi took the deep breath you’ve been holding the entire time he spoke, and he looked directly at you this time as he spoke.

“I knew he loved you. He loved you, maybe a bit more than he knew what to do with. God, if you only saw how he’d glare at any guy that tried to even look at you. They were ridiculous – hilariously vicious. He always did it behind your back, but it was about as subtle as a flashing neon sign. I don’t know how you never caught him.You followed him around, sure, but he made sure he kept you by his side, never letting you stray too far from him. Because if you weren’t next to him, then he was… lost. It’s stupid but– yeah, I think I knew he loved you, even before he knew it himself. And I could have told him. Should have told him. It would have been easy, quick – ‘Bokuto, Y/N is in love with you’. And he would have gone running. Well, nevermind. It might have taken him a couple days, but when it hit him… I don’t think anything in the world could have stopped him.”

Silver streaks on Akaashi’s face matched the warm tears that trickled down your own, and you tried to catch his gaze but at this point, he stared fixedly down at his lap.

“Keiji…” you called out to him, somehow wrangling his name through the tightness of your throat, because you need him to look at you. Needed him to see that you didn’t blame him, would never even think to. But he doesn’t meet your eyes. Instead, he barrels on.

“But I didn’t. Obviously. I kept my mouth shut, and just watched you two bumble around like idiots. It was, believe it or not, torturous for me. For the longest time, I kept my nose out of your business, because I know what it’s like to… Ahh,” He bows his head, and covers his eyes with the palm of his hand. It took a moment before he wiped his hand away and continued, “I did try once, though. With you. And I felt so completely iced out afterwards, I remembered exactly why I kept out of it for so long.”

He must have sensed the rebuttal at the tip of your tongue, but he interrupts you before you could even start.

“I’m not telling you this to make you feel guilty. I’m telling you this because… I was afraid too. I was scared that if I had kept pushing, then you would have pulled away from me completely. I was scared that Bokuto would think I was overstepping my boundaries. I was scared that it would work out, and the two of you would phase me out of your lives. I was scared it wouldn’t work out, and everything would be…”

His voice trailed off, so you softly finished for him, “Fucked up?”

He finally, finally looked at you then. You reached across the table and held his hand in yours. You felt him stiffen for a second before turning his hand and curling his own fingers around yours. A giggle of relief spills from your lips, and it elicits a chuckle from Akaashi, and the sound blooms within you.

“You guys are my best friends,” Akaashi said, his grip on you tightening just a fraction, “And I saw what you were putting each other through. I was watching it all happen in front of my own eyes. I should have done something more, right? If I had tried harder with you, if I just talked to Bokuto, if I bothered even just a little bit more to get over my shit and helped my friends… Then this never would have happened. And Kuroo… God, Kuroo. He didn’t need me to do a damn thing, he just loved you but still I managed to fuck things up for him and –”

“Shut up!”

Akaashi started a little at your sudden outburst, but it achieved the desired effect. He blinked at you once, then twice. You almost felt a twinge of guilt at your lack of patience, considering all that Akaashi was beginning to unpack in front of you. But weren’t you the one that called dibs on the mental breakdown today? If he thought you were just going to sit there and listen to his blasphemy, then he’s sorely mistaken.

“Don’t you even try to blame any of it on yourself, Keiji,” you spat out, irritated, “How could you even say something so convoluted? How could you even think such a –”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Akaashi interrupts you fervently, as if desperate to get you to listen to him, “I let my fears hold me back, instead of facing it for the people that mattered to me. I’m just a coward.”

“No, Keiji. You’re not a coward. You…” You let out a heavy breath, all the sharpness in your tone now softening at Akaashi’s deep set frown, “Do you even have any idea how much you saved me? Even though things were… unspoken between us, I knew you understood me. Without me ever having to say a single word, you understood me. And you never judged me or tried to tell me I was wrong. You just… you just held my hand. No matter what happened, good or bad, if I looked to my side, I knew I would see you there. Do you think you’re the only person that notices the little things? I felt your support, and I felt your love. Even when you didn’t say it out loud.”

“But–”

“No more buts, I really don’t want to hear it. You weren’t the one responsible for us,” your eyes were hard, providing no room for arguments, “You were just a kid. What could you have even done? You saw how stubborn I was being! Do you really think I would have listened? You were young, and afraid, and didn’t know any –”

Too late. The words flew out of your mouth quickly, you didn’t even think twice about it. Your guard was down, and you knew that was the most dangerous thing around Akaashi Keiji. Because too slowly did you realize the trap he laid out in front of you. And as the words slipped past your lips, you realized you were already too late. Akaashi was already looking at you with that smug grin.

“It’s not the same, and you know it.”

“No, it’s not,” He chuckled at you as if you weren’t staring daggers at his soul right now, “But if you can afford me that much grace, then I think you owe the same to yourself. Everyone makes mistakes. You won’t meet a single person that doesn’t have any regrets. But you can’t let those feelings define you. Only improve you. I know you’re feeling… a lot of shit right now that I probably can’t even begin to process. But it’s what you do with those feelings that matter.” He propped an elbow on the table, and rested his chin in the palm of his halls. “Are you gonna let it keep you down?”

You felt a little stunned, and though Akaashi’s words were simple, you could feel them find their mark. Hot tears pricked at the corner of your eyes yet again, and you didn’t look away from Akaashi as you let them fall. Still, you crossed your arms indignantly and pouted. “I can’t help but feel like I fell for some dirty trick.”

Akaashi laughed this time, waving his hand to beckon you closer to him. You begrudgingly moved from your spot, ignoring the ache in all your joints from your lack of movement, and crawled to sit beside Akaashi. He lifted the kotatsu skirt for you to settle under before wrapping an arm around your shoulder. “Dirty trick or not, as long as it gets the point across.”

“I understand, Keiji. I do, but still,” you sighed, leaning your head against his shoulder, “It’s difficult not to feel foolish.”

“I know,” Akaashi said as he laid his cheek against your crown, “I know. Fools in love, right?”

You didn’t know what to say, so you chose not to say anything. The lull in conversation allowed you the time to process his words, closing your eyes to feel everything you’d been avoiding the entire day. With a deep inhale, and a slow exhale, you silently search for the strength to let it all go.

A buzz on the table catches your attention. Akaashi makes a point to ignore the notification, even more so when it buzzes again.

The sight of his phone only served to remind you of your own, sitting dead and silent somewhere in the corner of your room for the entire day, of the calls that went straight to voicemail, of the messages that are unanswered – of the two men on the other side of line, waiting to see which way their world is about turn.

“Have you heard from…”

Akaashi lets out a snort through his nose. “Oh, yes, I have. I’m probably dead for ignoring all the calls and texts. But I needed to make sure you were alright before I answered anything.”

You chuckle, moving out of Akaashi’s one-armed embrace and sitting up to face him fully. “I love you, Keiji. I’d pick you if you were in love with me too, you know. What do you say? Wanna throw a towel in the ring?”

Akaashi laughed, loud and brash and genuine, and for the first time that day, you actually believed that everything will be alright. “I love you too, y/n. But I’d rather die.”

You nudged him hard with your elbow before standing up, leaving Akaashi to rub the sore spot while you stretched out your sore limbs. “I guess it’s time to stop hiding now, right?”

“Yeah…” Akaashi trails off, and you wait for him to ask the question you could see had been brewing in his mind for hours, “What are you gonna do?”

The question shoots a pang of loneliness through you. Because no matter what decision you make, everything will change. Your friendships will not walk away unscathed, and there will never be going back to the way things were. This was irrefutable, and that thought alone should terrify you, should make you want to scramble back on your knees and beg the gods to turn back time. Yet, it doesn’t.

No, instead you’re filled with a sense of clarity that you’re not sure you’ve ever felt before. It pained you to know that you’ll hurt the people that matter to you the most, but not as much as it would pain you to know that you weren’t being true to yourself.

It was time for you to choose your own happiness.

“Nothing’s changed for me, Keiji. I’ve always known what I was gonna do. Whether this truth came out or stayed hidden forever… my answer is going to be the same.” You smiled sadly as you spoke to Akaashi, and he offered nothing but an understanding nod, “From now on, for me, it’s always going to be him.”

✧: @kawaii-angelanne @boosyboo9206 @theglitterypages @rntrsuna @vinsmouke @chi-anpan @jinadamsel @kowalsqq @arcorjoan @galaxyfloater3

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